REIN J. VANDER ZEE ASSISTANT TO THE SENATE DEMOCRATIC WHIP AND ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE MAJORITY 1961-1964 Oral History Interviews January 28, 1992 Senate Historical Office Washington, DC

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Interview #1

January 28, 1992

RITCHIE: I wanted to start by asking about your roots. You're from Texas

originally. Where about?

VANDER ZEE: Near San Antonio. Actually, I was born and lived my first

eight years in San Antonio. Then the family home was moved fifty miles away into the

Texas Hill Country to the west of the more famous part which is Johnson's home in

Johnson City. We're about a hundred miles to the west of there. But it's similar country.

It's rural and subsistence agriculture is the only economy. It's a rugged life. But it's

beautiful country, and people come there and get to know and like it. It's become quite a

retirement area for people that didn't know about it before. I think if there is anything

that President [Lyndon] Johnson contributed to Texas it was a knowledge of the Texas

Hill Country that more or less became national, where before his time it had been

localized thing. So that's been my family base for all my life.

RITCHIE: What did your father do?

VANDER ZEE: He was a career soldier. My father was an immigrant from the

Netherlands. He came to this country in the

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early part of the century; and after going to farm with a brother in South Dakota and

Minnesota, where they had farms in both states, he entered the military in World War I

and then remained in the military until he died. One piece of family history I've never

been able to uncover is why he went to the military and his brother, who remained on the

farm, did not. I'm assuming that they had an exemption situation in those years similar to

World War II and that they either agreed or drew lots for the exemption.

But in any event, my father made a military career and died and is buried in the

Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. He died early in life at age 42,

prior to the outbreak of World War II, which might have been fortuitous for him because

my mother often said he probably would have died as a result of what happened in the

Netherlands and to his family in World War II. But that's the background of his side.

RITCHIE: You grew up on military bases then?

VANDER ZEE: I was born in Fort Sam Houston in 1928. In 1936 the folks

built this place in the country, which is the family home, intending to use it for their

retirement home when my father left the military. He had over twenty years at the time

of his death. After they built the home, he promptly passed away within a year or so. We

didn't live on a military base but a very short time in the early years.

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RITCHIE: And so you attended public schools around the area there?

VANDER ZEE: I began in public schools in San Antonio for the first and

second grades. When we moved to the country in 1936, I was in the third grade. I went

to little one-room school. There were about sixteen of us kids. We had one teacher who

taught about seven grades. We all got there on our own—no buses. My younger brother,

who was in the first grade, and I walked, and some of the other kids rode their horses.

There were no paved roads in the area at that time, so you couldn't use bicycles or

anything like that. It was either hoof it or horseback. We didn't have horses so we

hoofed. But it's a part of my personal life and upbringing that I recall with great pleasure.

We had outhouses, and we had a cistern that caught the rain water when it ran off

the roof, and each day somebody in the school had the duty to pull the water from the

cistern to put it in the water cooler for the kids to drink. Of course we all brought our

lunches. There weren't any school lunch programs in those days. [laughs] I've always

thought that the people in today's world who think they are being deprived really aren't.

All they really need to do is want to learn.

But anyway, I attended public schools both in San Antonio and Bandera, which is

this little town and county. And, finally, in high school I did attend during World War II

the Texas Military Institute, which is in San Antonio. It's famous for being the alma

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mater of Douglas MacArthur, Class of 1897. During my time we had a personality that

later became well known. He was Dan Blocker, who played "Hoss Cartwright" on

television's Bonanza. We also had an astronaut or two. You know, a smattering of

fellows who gained notoriety during their lifetimes. It's an interesting little school. It

still turns them out—people like that. That was high school.

RITCHIE: And then you went on to college. Was that in part because of the

military support from your father's career?

VANDER ZEE: No, no. As a matter of fact, I probably wouldn't have been able

to go to college, except that I was fortunate to get athletic scholarships. I had a little

athletic talent in high school. So I took athletic scholarships to a military junior college

in Texas called Schreiner Institute, first year. Second year, I went to the University of

Arizona at Tucson, where I was on a basketball team with Morris Udall. Morris was a

very popular guy out there. He was a senior in the law school at that time. This was the

1947-48 school year. I liked him a lot myself. Of course I knew him later when he came

to Washington. In fact, I was working for Hubert Humphrey in 1961 when Mo came to

town. His brother Stewart, whom he was replacing, had told me he was going to be

coming, and he invited me over to a reception in his office for him, so I took Humphrey

along that evening. Everybody had a grand

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time. Of course I continued to see him. It's very unfortunate the illness that caused him

to have to give up his seat.

Then from Arizona, I went back to Texas where I finished at Trinity University in

San Antonio my final two years. Took a BA in Economics at Trinity. I went almost

immediately then to the FBI. Came to Washington for the first time in my life on January

3, 1952.

RITCHIE: You just applied to the FBI?

VANDER ZEE: They had a representative come to the University and proselyte

young fellows. For reasons I'll never understand, I was the only one chosen around there

that year. The fellow that came out was a graduate of that university, and they were

actively looking for prospects in those days—the reason being, in my recollection, that

the FBI inherited all this responsibility for the Atomic Energy Act. For instance, you had

to do a full background investigation on every carpenter, bricklayer and what have you

that they employed in those programs. It put a tremendous manpower requirement on the

FBI. Subsequently, they got rid of all of that, got it shifted over to the Civil Service

Commission. But it was a period of time there in the early 50's where the FBI had to do

that.

RITCHIE: So you came to Washington to train with the FBI?

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VANDER ZEE: Came to train in the spring of '52. Stayed three years. Did

about a year each in Richmond, Virginia, here in the Washington field division and

Philadelphia. Senior people in the FBI who befriended me told me that you needed to

make a decision about whether or not you wanted a career with the FBI before you

reached the five-year mark because, they said, you become dependent on the check. You

start raising a family, having kids and financial obligations; and it would be difficult to

break away after five years.

So I took their advice to heart and I decided I didn't want to do it for a lifetime

profession and I left after three years. Just that simple.

RITCHIE: What were you doing mostly as an FBI agent?

VANDER ZEE: In the Richmond division I had what's called general criminal

work in a road territory. My territory was the northern neck of Virginia. I think there

were eleven counties out there that were my responsibility. So any leads that came in

that had to be handled out there I took care of. I did that for a year. Then back here in

Washington it was surveillance of the Soviet Embassy. We kept daily track of

everybody—I'm not telling any secrets here, this is all well known stuff. Anyway, the

Cold War is supposed to be over now. [laughs]

But I did that exclusively for a year. We memorized the names—not just the

names—we memorized the physical appearance of

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every employee of the embassy and every member of their families. There is no question

that there was a tremendous effort on their part in the espionage area during those years.

They were actively seeking a lot of things—a lot of technology, a lot of science from this

country. And they acquired a lot. I must say they did.

We had to keep track of them wherever they went. When you started out in the

morning you never knew whatever time of day—I usually worked noon to midnight

regular shift hours—but when you started out, you never knew where you might wind up.

You might wind up in New York, or Philadelphia, or most anywhere.

We had this one occasion where we followed a car driven by a fellow who was

supposed to be a cultural attache. He wound up down in southwest Virginia where the

famous summer theater is. You may remember the name of the town.

RITCHIE: The Lime Kiln? Or the Barter Theater?

VANDER ZEE: The Barter Theater. You may remember the name of the town?

RITCHIE: Bristol, perhaps.

VANDER ZEE: It's near Bristol. Abingdon, I believe. Anyway, he traveled all

the way down there; and he went to the home of this scientist\doctor, who I don't

remember if he was still active or retired. The Russian's name was Georgei Pokrovski.

I'll never

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forget his name because he was a real professional, hard-working spy. But this man he

went to see had developed the technique for the indefinite preservation of penicillin in the

field in World War II. That's what they were after. They had penicillin, but apparently

they didn't know how to preserve it indefinitely for field use, military use. Almost

invariably everyone cooperated once the contacts were made and we identified what the

Russians were after.

I never agreed with Mr. Hoover about the communist threat—the domestic

communist threat. But he was dead right about the Soviet threat. Mr. Hoover was a

master administrator. He was a very talented administrator. Had I been the head of the

FBI, I would have run it exactly as he did. But as a peon [laughs] in the ranks, I chose

not to make it a career.

RITCHIE: Did you ever encounter J. Edgar Hoover?

VANDER ZEE: Oh, yes. Surely. Well, of course, it was a routine that when

you go in the FBI and you're just about the graduate from agents' school you'd go by the

Director's office and meet him and shake hands. This was [laughs] one of the great tests.

They would rehearse you for this—literally. One of the people in the training division

would be Mr. Hoover, and they would check you for steadiness of eye contact and

firmness of handshake; because Mr. Hoover on occasion had been known to say that

somebody looked like a truck driver or something [laughs]. So they'd go

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back, sit down and look at this group of men and decide who looked most like truck

drivers and send them packing. It was quite an unusual thing. Mr. Hoover was an

absolute ruler in his area. So anyway, that was one of the things that you did before you

went to the field.

Mr. Hoover would always be standing by the side of his desk. Pictures would not

be taken individually. But he would be standing by the side of his desk, and Mr. [Clyde]

Tolson would always be seated in the window seat facing Pennsylvania Avenue.

I never met him further when I was in the FBI. But after I worked on the Hill and

went downtown to practice law I had my office on DeSales Street. That's a little one-

block long street beside the Mayflower. And each day—not every day, but frequently—

I'd go over to the Mayflower to the Rib Room to eat a bite at lunch. Mr. Hoover and Mr.

Tolson at that time, that was their lunch spot, and you could set your clock on their

arrival. They had lunch there every day. So I used to see him and greet him there. And

also at the race track out at Laurel. He was a very devoted racing fan.

He was not overly cordial. But he knew me as a former FBI boy, one of the boys

who had been there. I liked him, too. As I say, I would have run the FBI exactly as he

did. He, though, had unusual power and authority that he had accumulated. But why

not? If you can get away with it. That's my response to that. I think maybe our

government in many of its areas could do with a little more authoritarianism rather than

have everybody so thoroughly

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compromised that they can't really be effective. One thing we were in those years: we

were effective. In recent times, I think, people would question whether the FBI can cut

the mustard in some areas any more like they used to. They seem to be frustrated in a

number of areas.

RITCHIE: It must have helped you some respects to have that on your vita in

the future as you went along, having been an FBI agent?

VANDER ZEE: Well, I always felt it should, because if nothing else it would

indicate you had undergone the rigors of your background check and that you couldn't

have done too many things wrong in your lifetime or you wouldn't have passed muster.

But I think in some areas, later as I passed through life, I think that maybe FBI agents—

ex-FBI agents—were lumped in a category, which I strongly disagree with, but

nevertheless I think some people looked at them as kind of stormtroopers. I think maybe

some people didn't like ex-FBI agents too much [laughs]. I think people were surprised

when Hubert Humphrey employed me, because he generally was identified as this liberal

who wouldn't have those kind of guys on his staff.

But we got along famously, and there wasn't any of that sort of thing involved in

any way in my politics. And I found this in the FBI, too—that you find a very mixed

brand of personal politics. Agents don't talk about it with outsiders—didn't in

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those years. I don't know whether they do now or not. We had a lot of diverse opinion

come up among our people. But, of course, the only person who ever spoke for the FBI

in those days—Mr. Hoover. Agents in charge of field divisions seldom made releases on

major cases. It was always in his name and it came from Washington. That was part of

the means of his central control.

RITCHIE: Were there other ex-FBI agents around up on Capitol Hill in those

days? It seems to me in the early years the FBI and the GAO provided some sort of seed

staff.

VANDER ZEE: There were a few, and always have been a few over the years.

Now, one big user of FBI agents on duty—accounting types in particular was Clarence

Cannon, who had a committee on the House side. I forget the committee. I should

remember.

RITCHIE: Probably the Appropriations Committee, wasn't it?

VANDER ZEE: I suppose it was. And, basically, what they were doing was, I

suppose, quasi-GAO functions—that is, doing accounting procedures on a lot of these

program costs. I had a couple of friends who served over there while they were fairly

senior agents. They went on to become associate directors of the FBI, both of those

fellows. It was a part—I think it was a part when Hoover assigned you over there—of

your grooming, so to speak, for bigger things in the Bureau.

But, yes, they were big users. There were individuals . . . there was a fellow on

this side. Frequently, some of the committees and subcommittees would use them for

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investigators for committee staff work. One I remember was named Frip Flannigan.

Frip's been around for ages. He later became a personal rep for the one of the big

chemical companies in the country, lobbied for them here on the Hill. I seem to recall it

was W.R. Grace & Co.

RITCHIE: He was counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

VANDER ZEE: Okay. I appreciate you're knowing those things because, while

I knew Frip well, I never knew exactly what his position on the Hill had been. Another

ex-FBI buddy on Capitol Hill was John Conway, who was Staff Director in those days of

the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

There's a bit of a camaraderie among ex-agents, I must confess. For instance,

that's how I know Frip, and he would know me as an ex-agent. Of course we both knew

at one time or another we worked on the Hill. There is an ex-agents society which is

quite active around the country. For instance, we have a chapter in San Antonio. There's

one virtually everywhere where they meet and socialize, have lunch, every month or two.

But, unfortunately, my personal business has always kept me from participating in that

very much. I'd go to an occasional meeting, but haven't pursued

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it. As far as I know, they don't grind any political axes or have any programs they push.

RITCHIE: Then you decided after three years to go to law school? Is that your

career plan?

VANDER ZEE: Well, this was the Korean period. I had been deferred during

my FBI tenure by my draft board back home at the request of Mr. Hoover. I went into

the FBI under the minimum age. I went in at age 23, and you're supposed to be 25. But I

think it was this thing I described earlier about the need for manpower that they waived

some of those requirements in those days. So I was 26 then at the end of the three years,

and my draft board extended my liability to age 35. I didn't want to just spend my life in

the FBI merely to avoid military service. I had no problems about military service.

So I left the FBI and went directly into the Navy, Navy intelligence. Spent four

years there. And the next four years, that would have been from '55 through '58, I trained

at their various schools and had a two-year hitch with the Commander-in-Chief of the

Pacific at Honolulu. At that time, it was Admiral Felix B. Stump who was running the

joint command out there.

The biggest thing we had was keeping track of ChiCom activity, with aerial

reconnaissance. That was my specialty. The Chinese Nationalists would overfly the

Chinese mainland and do the photography. We would interpret it back in Pearl Harbor

and keep

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track of the Chinese military buildup, which was quite extensive. They built a lot of

airfields and things over there. And so we just monitored that.

Later on I was what was called a special weapons officer. We gave we assigned

special weapons or nuclear targets to our aviators. I would meet them in Pearl Harbor

when the carriers came out and I would ride out with them to the western Pacific and give

briefings and things on the way and fly back to Pearl and do it again. It was an

interesting time and gave me an insight, which I have always been grateful for, into the

operations of the military, and specifically the air arm of the Navy. I still marvel at how

they can make one of those damned aircraft carriers do what it's supposed to do. It's a

monstrous coordinated effort and very, very impressive, I think, to anyone that's every

witnessed it.

RITCHIE: I was stationed in Pearl Harbor, too, when I was in the Marines. I

remember when those aircraft carriers used to come in. They were immense. Even as

many times as you saw them, you were impressed when they arrived. They were a

floating city.

VANDER ZEE: Were you at Pearl?

RITCHIE: Yes.

VANDER ZEE: Or at Kaneohe?

RITCHIE: We were at Pearl. We were at the Marine barracks at Pearl Harbor.

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VANDER ZEE: Well, I was up there on the Hill, you know, at Makalapa. That

was the fleet headquarters in those days.

RITCHIE: We actually worked in Pearl City, so I used to drive by there every

day.

VANDER ZEE: Been to the old Pearl City Tavern there a time or two? [laughs]

RITCHIE: To the monkey bar, right?

VANDER ZEE: One of the great bars in the world. [laughs] When I was there

they featured Miss 44D. I'll never forget her. She was a thing of beauty. They'd bring

out entertainers from Stateside for the servicemen, of course. I don't know who owns that

thing, but it's a true institution. I asked someone recently if it's still there and going. And

they said, Oh, yeah.

RITCHIE: I was there about four years ago and stopped in, and it's still going.

VANDER ZEE: So my time there was split, part of the time we had that photo

interpretation center over on Ford Island, so I

worked back and forth between Ford Island and the fleet headquarters up on the side of

the hill. Admiral Stump ran the joint command and Vice Admiral Curts, as I recall, was

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the Seventh Fleet Commander in those days. And, of course, we were rulers of the world

in those days. No problems whatever.

I enjoyed it. But again, it's one of those things that didn't appeal to me for a

career.

So, to give you the way I got back to town here. I had thought I was in for a two-

year hitch and I had made application to Georgetown Law School and been accepted.

Suddenly someone pulled out some records and they decided I had a four-year obligation.

So I didn't quite know what to do. I had a house guest one evening—an Admiral

Kaufman who was commander at that time of Annapolis Naval Academy. He was out

there on a trip, and we got to be friends. We were having a couple of snorts down at the

Makalapa BOQ [bachelor officers quarters] there. I invited him over to the house to meet

the little woman and we were sitting around having some dinner. I told him about my

problem and sought his advice. I think he was just getting ready to take the command

down at Annapolis, he was still in the Pentagon. So he asked me to give him the

particulars, which I did. Not long after I received orders to come to the Intelligence

School in Washington and finish out my Navy career as an instructor over there. I'll be

forever grateful to Admiral Kaufman because I was able to complete my Navy career and

go ahead and get two years of my law school out of the way at the same time.

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RITCHIE: That's great.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. You bet. And then immediately following that—well I

terminated my service 31 December '58 and by the third or fourth of January '59 I was

with this Congressman Steven B. Carter from Iowa.

RITCHIE: How did that come about?

VANDER ZEE: I was actively seeking employment up on the Hill. I just had an

abiding interest in the political process and American government. It had slipped up on

me over the years. I guess it started in college when I was a student politician elected to

the student council in Trinity. And, you know, political awareness arrives at some point

in your life and it had sharpened over the years in the FBI—I guess being around

Washington a good bit added to that. I'd met a few people on the Hill in some visits with

colleagues of mine, some members. So I decided to give it a shot. I put out some

resumes. And this gentleman called me.

It appears that my father's cousin who was also a Vander Zee, like many of the

Dutch, went to Iowa. He apparently was one whose family had taken him there as an

infant. He had become a Rhodes scholar, and an educator, and I think about a thirty-year

professor. I believe he headed the political science department at the University of Iowa.

In fact, he became the person in Iowa who selected the Rhodes scholars from Iowa. I

guess that made him kind

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of the secretary of the association for the state. I don't know exactly how that worked.

But in any event, this fellow Carter had been a student of his. Apparently the man

also had been a rock-ribbed Democrat in a Republican state and had always taught a

liberal line of politics out there. Carter ran and was elected as a Democrat in a district

that had been Republican forever. So I guess it was just as simple as that connection.

And I knew this man, too. I had known him earlier in my life, this gentleman from Iowa.

I had met him in his retirement after he'd moved to New Hampshire, in my efforts to

broaden the contacts within our family, people bearing our name in various states. He

was a fine gentleman.

Carter, in any event, said he hired me because I was related to that Vander Zee

who had taught him in Iowa. He also authored books on Iowa history, among others

being The Dutch in Iowa, Dutch Trails in Iowa, and that sort of thing. They're over in the

library, of course. His first name, I believe, was Jacob. [See Jacob Van der Zee, The

Hollanders of Iowa (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1912).]

Carter was the only one who knew it, but he came to office with an untreatable

type of cancer. And he died in the early days of November of 1959 [November 4]. So it

became my lot, after going to Iowa and taking him home along with his family and after

his burial in the little town of Leon, Iowa, where he was from, to attempt to run a

campaign for a successor—a college professor from

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the college in Grinnell. I can't recall the name of that college. Ought to. It's well known.

Been out there forever.

RITCHIE: Grinnell College?

VANDER ZEE: It was Grinnell College. But Ed, trying to remember Ed, he

was a political science professor there who got the district convention nomination in a

special election arrangement. Herschel Loveless was governor. He called a very quick

election, I think, for around mid-December. Gilmore was the name of the nominee, Ed

Gilmore.

In the short time of that campaign, we couldn't overcome the Republican

advantage. A Democrat could not sustain himself there; so the Republicans returned.

They put a fellow in office named John Kyl, who was well known in the area because he

was a TV newsreader in Ottumwa, Iowa, which was the largest city in the district at that

time. So John came to Congress from that district.

I came back to Washington licking my wounds because I was a youngster and

very charged up as most youngsters are about their politics. You don't like to lose—

especially when you're trying to vindicate a guy who had lost his life and all that sort of

business. I very quickly encountered one of my old friends, one of those acquaintances I

spoke of having met—a fellow named Barrie—Bob Barrie, who was putting together a

campaign staff for Hubert Humphrey. And I decided to go with Humphrey because he

was the

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only one going! This is in the very beginning of 1960. [Lyndon] Johnson was talking

about it, but Johnson wasn't going to do anything overtly or form any organization, or

staff, or go out and be active. [Stuart] Symington was making a few motions. Of course

[John] Kennedy. Kennedy started his effort well back—for the four years leading up to

'60, after the vice presidential nomination that he lost to [Estes] Kefauver in the previous

convention.

But, going back to Carter, just for a moment. I remember one day when Carter

got a call and was invited to lunch with Senator Kennedy. He came back and said it was

a one-on-one lunch. And Kennedy did this methodically with all of the members of the

House during the period leading up to 1960. To be personally acquainted, you know?

And it was very effective! Very effective because Carter, while he was a freshman and

probably more impressionable than older members, he was nevertheless impressed. Of

course, that was the object of the whole thing. So Kennedy was going about it in a very

methodical way.

RITCHIE: Before we go on, I wanted to ask you, what did you do in Carter's

office?

VANDER ZEE: Oh, I was AA [Administrative Assistant]. Yeah, I was hired as

the AA. As you know, hope springs eternal, and he didn't want it to be publicly known

that he was suffering from cancer. So he refused to announce that. At the same time, he

knew that his chances of survival were probably not good. He asked me

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to put his son, I believe the boy was Stephen Carter, Jr., I think he was 17. Could have

been 18. Anyway, he was a student here, I think, at American U. He told me to put him

on the payroll at the highest possible salary. And I did. And within a day or two,

Scripps-Howard or somebody was jumping on it. That was one of the big nepotism

scandals of the day.

I'll never forget. That's the time that Mark Russell and I first got acquainted in

'59. He was working at the Carroll Arms, which was across the street, as you know, on

the corner here from the Senate office buildings. He was the pianoman down in the

basement over there down at the bar. And Mark, he was doing his shtick even in those

days—it hasn't varied much from the beginning. About that time Frankie Laine had a

monster hit called "That Lucky Old Sun." So Mark did great things with the lyrics

pinned to the nepotism of the Carter son. [laughs] The whole thing was terribly

unfortunate, but, you know, the people didn't know. After all, nobody publicly disclosed

about the cancer thing. So it was seen strictly as a nepotism deal. Like always, it causes

big problems. You're trying to run an office; and, hell, you can't do anything for awhile

until it all dies down. But, of course, shortly thereafter Steve began to show the overt

signs of his cancer and was taken out to Bethesda. He had to be carried back into the

chamber a few times to vote on some stuff. It was a very sad time. I believe he was in

his forties. He wasn't that old a man.

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But, that was my introduction to politics. I got an early exposure to the

Washington press and guys like Clark Mohlenhoff and some of the old fire eaters around

here that jumped on everybody. Well, I suppose if you disclose the human side of the

thing to some of these newsies, they'd lay off. But I don't know, current evidence seems

to indicate they don't much give a hoot. A very impressive statistic, I forget the boy's

name, but he used to run the Senate press gallery—and I think prior to that, during World

War II—I think there'd been a combined gallery, House and Senate. He told me one time

how many people had credentials to the combined gallery during World War II. Now,

this is a time we were winning a world war and building a great nation. And it was

something substantially less than a hundred. Substantially less than a hundred. Might

have been less than fifty. I was impressed by how small a number. Even back then when

he told me this story—back in the early 60's—it was up in the hundreds. Now I think it's

up in the thousands.

RITCHIE: Thousands

VANDER ZEE: I don't think in my own mind that there's any question that this

has become a huge detriment to effective political leadership and effective government in

the United States, because every little town out there seems big enough to have a stringer

in Washington. They're all running around trying to get something personal on

everybody in public life. I think all it

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does is two things: it destroys the American people's faith in their institutions and their

political leaders. This stuff of dwelling on personal habits, I mean, we didn't used to hear

about Dennis Chavez being a drunk. Everybody just laid off, because he was chairman

of a committee. He did a hell of a job for his state. People loved him. Unfortunately, the

man was an alcoholic. But they didn't write about it.

The most common example given is how they laid off President [Franklin]

Roosevelt's being a cripple. Never photographed him that way. Never created any

embarrassment. Well, that thing is all gone now, and I don't think our country is any

better served for it. In fact, I think it's been a tremendous detriment, as I say. Well, it has

gone a great distance toward destroying the American people's faith in their government

and their institutions of government. But beyond that, it keeps effective people in my

mind from coming to government. They don't want to get into these deals where all these

personal situations are ferreted out with all this embarrassment. They just say to hell with

it. That's a terrible thing to happen to a country and I think our Fourth Estate is mostly

responsible for that.

I have frequently said, and I mean it, that I don't think that all of the efforts of

Soviet communism or world communism ever did as much to harm American

government as the American press. That's my personal opinion.

24

RITCHIE: Was that Don Womack, the fellow in the press gallery who told that

to you?

VANDER ZEE: I think he was Bill somebody. A little kind of a baldheaded

guy.

RITCHIE: Or Roy McGhee?

VANDER ZEE: Hmmm. No. No.

RITCHIE: Joe Willis and Don Womack. There are several people up there, and

I was just wondering if I could think of who you meant.

VANDER ZEE: Well, this goes back—the time I was talking about—was '59 to

'63. Whoever it was at that time was giving me that statistic, and I was shocked by it.

And as I say, the statistic was then. That's thirty years ago. And the numbers have just

mushroomed since then, I'm told.

RITCHIE: What were your responsibilities as an administrative assistant to a

freshman member of the House?

VANDER ZEE: Well, the usual thing, mainly to hire—with his approval, of

course—and organize staff, and parcel out the work. It was largely the matter of

constituent mail. He had some

25

programs in the district that were important. One was the construction of the Rathbun

reservoir, which was ultimately built. It wasn't built during our time. But to continue to

promote that. That was near Ottumwa, as I recall. I forget the river that it harnessed.

But, as it turned out, because of his illness and his severe disability, I literally many times

had to fill the slot for a member that couldn't be there by—well, just directly representing

him.

One incident that I will always remember because of unusual circumstances, was

we had a constituent that had known him as a youngster—he had been born and raised

out there—who had an airline based in Oakland, California. It was one of these Terry

and the Pirates-type of things that fly stuff overseas, special delivery, spray grasshoppers

in Egypt—that sort of thing.

RITCHIE: A non-sked they used to call them.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah, right. Bring a load of snakes from wherever. Fly your

football team wherever—which ultimately caused the demise of his airline. He lost a

football team in a crash. And once you have a crash in a private airline you can't survive.

Whether you've done anything wrong or not is beside the point. You can't survive the

FAA investigation. They'll always find something somewhere in your records of your

engine changes or something that puts you out of business.

26

Anyhow, he had noticed a solicitation for an Air Force contract to fly a cargo

around the Far East for the Air Force. And the contract bid was to be submitted at

Kadena Air Force Base outside of Tokyo. He had figured out that he could take his

fleet—well, I think he wasn't even going to use his existing fleet. He was going to

acquire not brand new, but used airplanes. He was going to put big cabin tanks inside the

cargo bay so he could fly them across the Pacific, nonstop, and then, execute the contract.

So he decided to bid on it. His cab driver told him on the way to Kadena Air Force Base

that he was wasting his time to come out there to submit a bid on that contract [laughs].

He did it anyway. And, after the bid opening, some second Louie called him from

Kadena and said, "Congratulations, Mr. Springer, you have won the contract." And then

he was called back within an hour and told, "Mr. Springer, we made a terrible mistake.

You didn't win the contract. We have to have new bids." [laughs] Well, to make a long

story short: the contract was traditionally the territory of either CAT Air or, the Chinese

National Airline—I forget the name of that, which was a CIA front. That's why nobody

else could win. But that lieutenant had goofed.

So Mr. Springer came to us, and in our naivete we thought, well, that's a strange

way to do business. Here this man was going to go to all these unusual expenses, and he

still bids the thing low against somebody that's already out there. So I started to write

letters and carry his grievance forward. One day I had a call from a staff member on the

Aviation subcommittee on the House

27

side—Earl somebody. Earl was a former FBI agent, and he asked me if I could visit with

him. I did. He kind of told me that that was an unusual situation out there, and he'd been

asked to talk to me to see if we wouldn't get off that thing.

I said, "Well, gosh almighty, Earl. It seems to me strange that if that much money

is being squandered that the American public has to hold still for this. I'll talk to my

superior, but I'll see what he says." And I did ask him, and he said, "Well, help Jim

[Springer] in any way that you can." This fellow Springer that was his old friend. So I

persisted.

Earl called me again one day after not too long a time. He asked me to come

meet a friend of his. We went out on one of those patios alongside the House office

building. It was a fellow from the CIA, and he wanted to talk about it. In my youthful

zeal, they couldn't convince me. I was just concerned that there was obviously a lot of

money slopping off the table out there. And I didn't see why that should be. I'd had some

experience. I had some friends over at the CIA during the FBI days. A lot of FBI guys

went to the CIA when it was set up. And so I continued to persist.

One day I had a call to come over and meet with Speaker [Sam] Rayburn. I'd

never met the Speaker, but I knew John Holton who was his AA. And so I walked in to

his office. John had that big outer office where a lot of people entered off the House

floor. But Mr. Rayburn's own personal office was long and narrow and not much bigger

than yours. John just said, "Well go on in Rein." So

28

I went in, and Mr. Rayburn was just sitting there kind of cleaning his fingernails. He

said, "How ya doin'?" And I said, "Fine, sir. I was told to come see you."

He said, "Yes. I know that your boss is very sick and I know that you are keeping

things going in his absence, and I just wanted to be useful." You know, this man I could

see—in looking back at that time, he was so nice, even with a flunky like I was around

there. He carefully explained, he said, you know sometimes things are a certain way.

Maybe they don't seem right, but there are reasons for it. He more or less talked in

indirect terms like that. And he kind of explained to me that was one of those things. So,

naturally, with that I forgot about it. We couldn't pursue it any more, didn't pursue it any

more. Because, in those years he was Mr. Sam, and he was the undisputed leader. He

was much respected by everybody on both sides of the aisle, by everybody there. So

when he spoke the words, you had to understand that that was the situation. But I can

only say that I was impressed by the way he did it. I don't even know if he knew I was

from Texas, but he was just saying "I know you're a young fellow and dedicated to your

boss, and dedicated to your ideals, but this is one you'd better just let go." So obviously

we did.

I subsequently got to visit with him because I became a friend of his AA, the

fellow that did his biography.

RITCHIE: Oh, D.B. Hardeman?

VANDER ZEE: D.B., yeah. In fact D.B. and I got together prior to his death,

we had a couple of nice lunches down in San Antonio. We used to see each other there,

29

either by accident or on purpose, and sit down and have lunch. D.B. used to come over

when I was working on the Senate side. He'd come over and visit, a very pleasant

association.

RITCHIE: It helped that you were from Texas.

VANDER ZEE: Probably, I got to know in those years, during the year on the

House side, and then even after I was on the Senate side, I got to know most of the Texas

fellows. They were a good bunch. There are two or three of them still over there, Jack

Brooks, Jake Pickle, and some of the old timers. I think all of the rest weren't there thirty

years ago.

RITCHIE: Speaking of Texas congressmen, I understand that you also had some

experiences with Maury Maverick.

VANDER ZEE: That's right. When I was a lad in San Antonio, in

approximately 1939, I think that was the year, I had a newspaper route near my home. On

the route was this gentleman whom I remember—I never knew his name, or wasn't

aware of his name at that time—but anytime I would be by in the evening for collection,

he would always invite me in the house to sit me down in his living room. And he'd

expound on the affairs of the city of San Antonio.

I didn't consider that particularly peculiar, but the peculiar side was why he would spend

the time with me, his paper boy [laughs], on this subject matter. I later learned he was

Maury Maverick Sr., who was then the mayor of San Antonio, and had previously been a

30

congressman from that area in Washington. After I was in Washington and working in

politics, I became friends with James H. Rowe, Jr. Jim was a practicing lawyer here at

the time I knew him, and a partner with a fellow named Tommy Corcoran. They were

pretty well known in Democratic circles because of their service with President Roosevelt

during his time in the White House.

Rowe used to tell me these great stories about Maverick. Among others, that the

president always called him the most aptly named man in American politics. He said, on

one particular occasion that he had gone against the president—voted against him—on a

measure that was very vital to Roosevelt. It might have been the Supreme Court bill, I

forget just which it was. But Jim, who was apparently privy to some of the conversations

in those years at the White House said that the president had him down and asked him,

"Maury, how in the world could you do that to me." And Maverick's response was, "I

didn't do it to you, Mr. President, because you weren't being yourself.' [laughs]

Then Rowe also related stories he used to tell about Maverick after his defeat. He

was defeated by a man named Paul Kilday. Kilday was a local attorney whose brother

was a sheriff and controlled what there was of the organization in those days, and it was

largely an Irish-Catholic—well, not just Irish Catholic. It

31

was Catholic, period, which included a great many of the Latinos in the area. So, Rowe

apparently was querying Maverick about his defeat and what happened, and one of his

responses was, "All I can tell you, Jim, is that those nuns were lined up there at the polls

like a bunch of penguins." [laughs] But it was after that that he became mayor. He was

not a man of the power-elite. He was a man of the common people, and, I guess, would

be branded a liberal.

But he did things for the City of San Antonio that, literally, are the centerpiece of

San Antonio today. For one thing, he got a public works—WPA, Works Progress

Administration—project there that was then called the Beautification of the San Antonio

River. It was not a river; it was an old, dirty canal. But that has become San Antonio's

centerpiece. That alone, along with the Alamo, have made San Antonio the number one

tourist destination—not only in Texas but, I understand, much of the country. Ranks as

one of the top tourist destinations in the country. And this has to be attributed directly to

Maury Maverick's foresight in the 1930s.

But there is an element within San Antonio, the old control group—there's such a

group in most cities, the moneyed people, the banks and what have you—to whom his

name is still anathema. Maverick's name is anathema still to these people, the second

generation, second and third by now.

RITCHIE: Did you have any sense when you were growing up that your family

had any political leanings?

32

VANDER ZEE: No. None whatever. As I said, my father died very early when

I was just barely nine years old, the oldest of three boys. My mother was very much

apolitical.

RITCHIE: Well, when you started out working for a Democratic congressman,

were you applying only to Democrats, or would you have worked for a Republican at that

stage? Had you made up your own political mind then?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah, pretty much, because I always did—and still do—

identify myself with the working people of this country. I was raised among them. I

think they're what makes not only our country but the world go around. I've tried to

associate with, and know, and understand people in the elite and the banking and investor

class, the upper social classes. But I've never been able to read them. I think this is some

of what Mr. [George] Bush is encountering today. I think they forgot about those folks.

We don't know yet, but it may very well abbreviate his presidency with the way things

are going.

Our Democratic presidents always seem to be acutely aware of the fact that the

pocketbook issue is always going to be the first one. If you go back and track the

philosophies of the really outstanding leaders on the Democratic side, either in the

presidency or in the Congress, they had this policy, spoken or unspoken, that if you let

your working man have a decent livelihood so that he could support his family, better his

station in life,

33

educate his children, that the rest of the society would take care of itself. I think that in

the last ten or fifteen years that thing has been lost sight of. Oh, it's not just that, because

we know there is also the Republican political philosophy which seems to pay great

homage and worship before the golden calf of the so-called free market. What they may

have forgotten is that now the free market is the world market. And you kind of

automatically make yourself a Third-World country if you go, if you pursue that to its

ultimate end. You penalize your people greatly. I think that's what's been happening,

because there's no hindrance. The people that control the economy, the means of

production, the capital, they flee to those low-labor areas and we can see the result here.

We have just exported so much of our economy to other parts of the world.

So, we're going to see how it comes out pretty soon.

RITCHIE: It's a real watershed, I think.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah, no question.

RITCHIE: Well, let's move up to when you went to work for Hubert Humphrey

in the 1960 presidential campaign.

VANDER ZEE: I encountered this friend of mine, Bob Barrie, who was in

charge of the campaign. He had already been anointed. Of course, everybody that

worked for Humphrey on his regular staff,

34

Herb Water, his press assistant—no, I guess Herb was his AA at that time—another

fellow named Bill Connell who was his legislative assistant, everybody was involved, but

it was necessary to develop a specialty campaign staff. Not having anything better to do

at the time, I signed on and was promptly dispatched to West Virginia, in January of

1960, to begin to organize matters over there for a May 10th primary. And I proceeded

to do that.

I spent the next four months over there. I considered myself a very low-level

organizing type. I was out on the hustings going from county to county. I did the

advance work when Humphrey actually physically came into the state, and spent the rest

of the time on organizational work. And then after the primary was lost on May the 10th,

I found myself elevated to campaign manager. [laughs] Seemed like nobody else wanted

the job! [laughs]

RITCHIE: Campaign manager for West Virginia?

VANDER ZEE: For West Virginia [laughs] at that point. Some of these old

pros—I was a neophyte—some of these old pros have a way of switching the titles

around when things don't go too well. I've always had a good laugh with them about that.

RITCHIE: That was the campaign where Humphrey claimed that the Kennedys

were spending so much money in West Virginia.

35

VANDER ZEE: Yes. It was. I mean, we had people who had declared with us

from early on; and, the last four or five days before the primary I began to call people,

sheriffs—people who were our county chairmen—and they were, for the first time during

that whole period, they were unavailable. They were busy somewhere. They couldn't be

found. So I knew we had serious problems, and I got in the car and started driving,

particularly in the southern part where the vote, honest to pete, is controlled. I mean, that

was the situation then, everybody knows it that's ever studied the situation. It became

apparent—I would go to a courthouse where our posters had been up since day one, and

they were down; and Kennedy's were up. And the sheriff was gone. He was up in the

hills somewhere. There was a Syd Christie who was the boss in McDowell County. I'll

never forget his telephone number. He lived in Keystone, West Virginia, and his

telephone number was number three. I never knew who had one and two. But he

became a federal judge, appointed as a federal judge by President Kennedy after the

election. But he delivered a solid—I think up in the eighty percentile range—county

down there. Big population county.

So it was a very intense effort within the last few days. Everyone that claimed to

have knowledge that I talked to said it was all greed. People who were astounded by the

result—people who had covered the campaign from its beginning—two that I remember

in particular were Bill Lawrence, who was then with the New York Times, and Alan

Otten. Bill's dead, but I think Alan is still

36

alive. Alan Otten of the Wall Street Journal, and I believe if a person went back to the

archives and checked their stories filed on the 8th or 9th of May, they were riding the

buses, they were tromping around following things rather closely, seeing the parades the

turnouts, etc. etc. I believe both of them filed stories saying it was Humphrey by 60-40.

And when the result came out virtually opposite, they were astounded.

Otten told me some time after that they had put about six or eight reporters into

the field down there to find out what happened. And he said, without mentioning names,

he said they had established where it came from, who carried it into the state, and who

distributed it. But, he said, we could never establish who got it. And I don't know

whether this was just his story to me to tell me they tried or what. I told him at the time, I

said, "Alan that's obvious. The last two people never tell. Neither the giver nor the

getter. And, so I don't think you'd ever be able to make that connection for the record,

and name names."

But anyway, it was a massive, massive influx of money. There were families, I

mean they had cash, they had cars, they were hauling people. It was a very well done

thing. We simply—there was no way with our resources, I don't think we spent a million

in the entire effort. And their expenditure had to be five or six times that, too. I think

this has been well studied out. I've had calls over the years. I had a call from an author

in West Virginia as recently as within the last two or three years, wanting to talk about

this. Somehow he ran me down in Texas, and he'd been on

37

Kennedy's staff. I forget his name, but he said he was writing a book. He'd been working

for Kennedy, so he had it from that side. But he knew a lot had happened that he didn't

know about.

RITCHIE: Did you cross paths with the Kennedy organizers while you were

working the state for Humphrey?

VANDER ZEE: Not a whole lot. We had meetings when we were organizing

the TV debate there in Charleston. I think it was just a statewide hookup. We had a

conference with Larry and Ken O'Donnell. Larry . . .

RITCHIE: O'Brien

VANDER ZEE: Larry O'Brien, thank you. You know more of these names than

I. I'm not good on names any more. I used to be letter perfect, but I've given up on it. So

we had a conference at the press club building there in Charleston that we always

frequented. It was the best food in town. We'd eat there, and we'd seen one another. But

we didn't have a whole lot of contact.

The attorney general in West Virginia was a fellow named Wally Barron, and he

was running for governor that year on the Democratic ticket. It was widely believed that

he had the best organization in the state. And we were trying to get Wally's organization

to give us their full support. We thought we were doing well in that direction. We had a

lot of lip service. I think what they were

38

able to discern late in the game was that this influx—in fact, I feel that maybe they

benefitted, their organization benefitted somewhat from that influx of cash. Because I

remember one time I had an appointment with Kurt Trent who was Barron's top assistant.

Incidently, all of these people wound up going to the penitentiary later on.

Anyway, I went to see Trent, and he shuttled me down the hall a couple of

offices, put me in a room. And in a little bit I heard Larry O'Brien's voice, and—I forget

at just what phase the campaign—but I have a hunch there was a lot of crossing and

double crossing going on. And it was pretty much who could bring the most money to

their game. Ultimately that turned out to be the Kennedys.

Now, I've always been fascinated—I have a hunch that, while Barron's people

benefitted from an influx of Kennedy money they also managed to alienate the Kennedys.

Later I think Bobby Kennedy went to great pains to put all those guys in the federal

penitentiary. So he apparently was unhappy with the effort they made, or the amount it

cost, because he put Barron in. He put Trent in. He put Clarence Ellmore in. Clarence

Ellmore became the liquor commissioner under Barron. Ellmore and Trent were his two

top lieutenants when he was running for governor. And after his election, those fellows

as well as some lesser individuals all did time on various charges. Once again, when you

can focus the resources of the U.S. Department of Justice on somebody, you're going to

get them for something. And they did. I've always

39

figured it was a personal vendetta brought about by that campaign. Otherwise, why not

leave them alone?

RITCHIE: How was Humphrey as a campaigner?

VANDER ZEE: Superb. Superb. As anybody that knew him could tell you, he

had the quickest recuperation capabilities I've ever seen in a human being. As I recall, he

was in his late forties, second half of his forties, when we made that run. I don't recall his

birth date or any exact ages. But he could wear out two or three staffs. He just had that

kind of stamina. He had the capability to catnap either on planes, buses, wherever it was.

And, while we were doing the campaigning out of a bus, we'd watch him because, as

we'd approach a town, nobody would wake him. He'd just pop up, look around, start

combing his hair. It was like he had a radar that there were going to be people there, you

see.

And he thrived on it. He loved to appear before people. And as a youngster, I

enjoyed being associated with him. He was an activist. It was total immersion. And

when you're young, you're ready for that. That's what you want in a candidate. Nobody

could outwork him. And he was a very decent human being. He was a lot of fun to be

with. I think that Humphrey's personal magnetism, ebullience, all the rest of it is best

demonstrated—I was amazed by this when I saw it just within the last three or four

years—it was whenever Barry Goldwater retired. Goldwater did one of those last

interviews with Barbara Walters on the occasion of his

40

departure from the Senate. And I think it was her last question of that interview. She

said, Senator Goldwater, after your years in public service, what politician did you like

the best. And he didn't hesitate or wink an eye. He said, "Hubert Humphrey." And I

thought that was rather remarkable given the polarity of their personal politics.

So, he was just that kind of a guy. To know him was pretty much to like him. He

just didn't have a mean bone in him. I think had he had some meanness, he would have

been more effective; because he never—people who knew him better than I, agree—he

would never exact that retribution or that pound of flesh after somebody had double-

crossed him. And I think for the effective politician, it's the fear of things he can do to

you. You've got to have some of that going. Terrible to say that. I'm sure that part of

Humphrey's esteem, and love, and the regard in which he was held by people was

because he wasn't that way. And what a lot of people maybe don't remember is that he

thrived in a Republican state as a Democrat. I think a great deal of it was just that

personal thing people had for him. A lot of Republicans had to be voting for him all the

time out there.

I saw a newspaper story just before the Super Bowl [in Minneapolis], that

someone was wondering who the athlete was that the [Hubert H. Humphrey] Metrodome

was named after. It shows you how soon they forget. That's why you historians are so

important, I guess, to keep the great unwashed knowledgeable about things, or at least to

preserve the truth.

41

RITCHIE: Well, after the West Virginia primary, Humphrey's campaign was

pretty well over, in many ways.

VANDER ZEE: Oh, yeah. In fact, that night, May the tenth, down in our old

store-front headquarters there in downtown Charleston, he made his withdrawal

statement.

RITCHIE: Where did that leave you?

VANDER ZEE: Unemployed. I came back to town. I'd had a friend over on the

House side named Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown was a congressman from the state of

Missouri, and he had been a staff man to [Harry] Truman when Truman was a senator.

Subsequently he had gone back home and been elected to Congress. He was a great

public servant, Charlie was. I think he had worked with the Ralston Purina people.

Charlie had a great public flair as a promoter and that type of thing. I think he worked

with some of the country music people from Nashville over the years. But in any event

he had himself elected congressman from the Springfield area. Springfield is the biggest

city in that district, southwest Missouri that would be.

Charlie had taken on the responsibility for Stuart Symington's campaign. So he

got in touch with me and asked me if I could come over there and hook up with him, and

I was delighted because he gave me something to do. And I spent the time from May,

just a couple or three months, I think we had a July convention in Los

42

Angeles that year. I spent that time with the Symington campaign. I went out West for

them. Through Jim Rowe, and people like that, I had Montana contacts. I know I was in

Montana working that state convention just before I went to Los Angeles. And I guess I

was in some other areas, too. And that was a very pleasant experience because

Symington was a fine man.

RITCHIE: How would you compare Symington as a candidate with Humphrey

as a candidate?

VANDER ZEE: Well, there really was no comparison as far as their desire to

get out there and get among them, you know. Symington was more taciturn. A great

gentleman, but he just didn't—you know, everybody has his own way of going about it.

And Symington's was more through the organization, the old friends that he had within

the party from his days as Air Force secretary and senator, friend of Mr. Truman's and all

of that. His family was active. He had two boys, Tim and Jim. I don't remember if there

were other active family members in the Symington family or not. I saw Jim down the

street the other day. He's in a law firm that a friend of mine heads, guy named Pat

O'Connor. He's an old Minnesotan. Pat and I first got acquainted back in 1960 in that

Humphrey campaign.

But, I grew to have an even greater respect for Senator Symington after I came up

and worked on the Hill. He always had an

43

ear. He'd listen to staff guys. Not necessarily his own, just anybody he knew.

RITCHIE: When you were out in the West, Ted Kennedy was handling a lot of

that territory for the Kennedy campaign.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmmm.

RITCHIE: Did you come in contact with him at that point?

VANDER ZEE: Not directly. He was in Montana. We thought we had

Montana pretty well under control for Symington. And we had a group out there. We

took a plane and four or five of us, a half a dozen people, and I think practically everyone

else was from Missouri. They were politicians, guys from the Missouri Farmers

Alliance, MFA people. We went out there and worked it pretty thoroughly for quite

awhile and thought we were in good shape. They were electing their delegates by state

convention. We overlooked the strength of a little group of Irishmen from down in the

copper town.

RITCHIE: Butte? Or Billings?

VANDER ZEE: No, it was in the southwest corner, where the Anaconda mine

is. It's Butte's sister city, Anaconda as a matter of fact. In any event, they came into

town, and they started

44

hammering pretty hard in the day or two just prior to the convention of the delegate

selection. There was a state chairman, whom I should remember. But I watched the

lights. They had him up in their hotel. The lights never went out the night before the

convention. And he died of a heart attack the next morning, on the start of the

convention. They got a majority of the delegates out of Montana, as I recall. I may be

wrong about that. We had some, but we didn't do as well as we expected. They pulled

that old power play, and they hammered the hell out of those people.

You know, you get a tough Irishman, you've got a guy who is not going to quit.

They had several of those that they used. Effective? Yes. How many friends it wins you

in the long run? I don't know. I don't know.

RITCHIE: It was quite a juggernaut.

VANDER ZEE: Oh, yes.

RITCHIE: And you came up against it all over the country.

VANDER ZEE: Oh, sure. Sure. It was a well financed and... They weren't the

darlings of the media as individuals that they'd become in subsequent years. But they

still had it going. And everybody knew that Poppa Joe was feeding the thing. But I think

what everybody overlooked—I certainly did—for instance, in West Virginia he had some

kind of ties into the very top of those coal

45

companies and made life just miserable for them because the people just got all kind of

pressure put on them from their bosses, you know, their employers. Tough deal. Tough

deal. And this was directly through, you know, this was a kind of an umbrella over

politics, but it was there, and it was effective. There was no question about it. And those

contacts came from years and years of that Wall Street stuff, because all that coal was

owned by somebody else. Hell, nobody in West Virginia owned any of it. So, yeah, it

was a hell of a coordinated effort.

The theory is that the ones the candidate or his brothers couldn't reach their dad

apparently had a way to get to. But we scared the hell out of them in West Virginia. We

really did. They knew that Jack's effort rode on whether or not he could prevail in a

relatively non-catholic area, as West Virginia was advertised as being. I guess it is, I

really don't know. But because they knew that, and because through the course of the

campaign, just as Otten and Lawrence read it, it looked like Humphrey was going to win

it pretty handily. They knew that they had to do something drastic, and they did it! And

it worked.

RITCHIE: Did you go on to Los Angeles for the convention?

VANDER ZEE: Oh, yeah, sure. I was with the Symington people out there.

Nobody knew if Stevenson was going to have any steam left. He wasn't making a

particular effort. So, you couldn't read that. And Johnson had taken the tactic of just

sitting on the

46

sidelines. As you may recall, he was just going to tend to business and run the Senate.

And did, by and large.

People like Jim Rowe, who was an old friend of Johnson's had come over and was

working with us for Humphrey because he said, "Hell, I've got to have a candidate! And

Johnson won't run; and, therefore, I'm going to get with the guy that's going." That was

the idea of a lot of us.

So in Los Angeles, Symington's strategy was that, if Johnson—or anybody else—

I guess Johnson was the logical one, I don't think anybody really figured Stevenson

would come back into it—although he did get a hell of a rousing hand and all that. There

was a good bit of excitement when his name was put in nomination. I think Gene

McCarthy made the speech.

It was basically the strategy of Symington that if Kennedy and Johnson somehow

managed to deadlock one another that maybe he would be a compromise choice. Didn't

work and really never got off the ground. But that was the whole thing. We had a

conference—I say, "we"—Charlie Brown and I talked with Humphrey about swinging

any support he might have over to Symington. And he did have some Wisconsin

delegates. He had some in West Virginia. He had delegates from other areas that could

have been pushed anywhere he wanted to go. But Symington never ever really got a big

enough head of steam going to make it work. We talked about it as late as the night

before the vote at the convention.

RITCHIE: There was a lot of talk that Symington might be the vice presidential

candidate.

47

VANDER ZEE: I don't recall that. I'm sure you're right. I don't recall it myself.

I just don't have any feel for that.

RITCHIE: Were you surprised when Johnson took second place on that ticket?

VANDER ZEE: A bit. My acquaintance with Mr. Johnson just went back to

when I worked here. I guess I met him in '60. But, I'll tell you a story involving him and

all the others. They all came over to West Virginia a few nights before the primary—I

mean the candidates that year, that would have been Senator Johnson, Senator Kennedy,

Senator Symington, and Senator Humphrey. The occasion was a political gathering in

Clarksburg, West Virginia, a few days before the West Virginia primary. I remember the

primary was on the 10th May, and this date could be established exactly because it was

the day that Francis Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over the Soviet Union. [On

May 5 the Soviet Union announced that it had shot the plane down on May 1.] I was

waiting up in the hotel up in Clarksburg, where we were staying, and when Humphrey

came in he said, "I was just downstairs and Johnson's down there having a press

conference and talking about the possibility of beginning World War III. It's something

about one of our planes

48

being shot down over Russia." He said, "I don't know what it's about and I'm wondering

what I should say."

It just happened to be one of those situations where because of my intelligence

time in the Navy, and also my contacts with some CIA people whom I had known from

my FBI times, I was aware of the existence of that aircraft. Furthermore, I had had

occasion to fly on a navy plane to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, with a

navy friend, and one of my specialties in the intelligence school was teaching the

identification of the world's military aircraft. So when I saw these aircraft on the ground

in Del Rio, I knew that they weren't a part of my curriculum. When I inquired about the

aircraft there at Del Rio, I was told that it was simply a classified aircraft. Subsequently,

that evening, the navy aviator with whom I was flying turned out to be a friend of the

base commander, and after we had gone to the BOQ and changed clothes and gone over

to the Officers' Club to use our complimentary drink chits, we met the commander of the

base, and since they had been old friends from joint maneuvers somewhere, they readily

told us—once they found out what his assignment was—that they were staging out of Del

Rio with the U-2, and that they went to Turkey principally, and other locations, and flew

missions over the Soviet Union. So with that information, I advised Senator Humprhey

that I didn't think it would be appropriate for him to comment, simply let that be

President Eisenhower's airplane, and if there was any explaining to do about it, let him

explain it. [laughs] And it was one of those times when strangely enough Senator

Humphrey did just

49

that, instead of getting involved. I thought it was an opportune situation where we just

happened to have the knowledge at the time that perhaps kept him from getting involved.

There is not much more significance about that, except that the purpose of the meeting

that night was to give the candidates a chance to air their candidacy before the people of

West Virginia, even though only two of the four were formally entered in the West

Virginia primary.

An earlier story relating to Johnson involved my next-door neighbor in Texas at

this little country home where my family lived. It was a summer home for this neighbor,

whose name was Wright Morrow. He was the national committeeman and Texas

Democratic chairman. He and his family lived in Houston, and they'd come out

frequently. about two-hundred and fifty miles to the hills, where he had this summer

place out by a pretty little river there. And his kids kind of grew up with us. We hung

out together during summers. He had a couple of daughters. I knew he was a big shot.

When I was a kid, I knew he was a big shot in Texas state politics and national politics.

National committeeman. But, we never talked about it. I just wasn't into that zone at that

time.

When I graduated from college I was there working on my mother's place one

day. He came over, and he said, "Rein, what are you going to do now that you got out of

college?" I said, "Well, I'm waiting to see if I'll be picked up by the FBI, Mr. Morrow." I

said, "I made an application and I still have a little time before graduation actually takes

place." And he said, "Well, if

50

you'd like for me to, Howard McGrath is a good friend of mine, and I'll give him a call

for you." I said, "Oh, gosh, Mr. Morrow, I've been specifically warned that anything like

that would be inadvisable because of the way Mr. Hoover is about any influence or

politics."

But he said, "Okay, but let me know if I can help you." So that was the end of

that. Then, after I was in the FBI, I was married some nine months into the FBI. I

married my college sweetheart, and we had gone back to Texas on annual leave. And,

again, we were visiting my mother's home. They were there, Morrow and his wife. And

it was a winter, I remember that. Anyway, they invited my wife and me down for drinks.

By this time, it's either late '52 or '53. He and I went out in the kitchen to stir up a drink

and he starts talking about "this no good SOB, that damn Johnson," see. I said, "Gosh,

Mr. Morrow, I know you've been chairman of the party and all, and I didn't know you

were so bitter about that fella."

And he said, "Well, he just has a way of forgettin' who put him where he is." And

this struck me—because this was a very good and decent man. I mean, he was good to

little kids, big kids, old women, he was just that kind of guy. Widely loved, and well

thought of. A Houston attorney. He'd gotten rich, even though he's a lawyer, by doing

acquisitions in the early days of the east Texas oil fields. You can read in books how he

got there. He was a friend of Jessie Jones, George Brown, those people. In fact, he told

me that night, he said, "Jessie Jones and George Brown and I

51

made it possible for this man to be sitting in the United States Senate today. It was us

who paid for the helicopter." You know, that kind of stuff.

He was very put out with Johnson because Johnson had chosen—now Morrow

had gone with the Shivercrats, and the Dixiecrats, you see, in that '52 campaign, and

Johnson had gone the other way. There may have been something more personal, but his

message was, the moral of his story was that Johnson will drop you like a bad habit the

minute that you no longer serve his interest.

When I came to work over on the Senate side, one day I was sitting around

chewing the fat with [Bobby] Baker, and I told him that story. And he knew who Wright

Morrow was. Some time later, after Baker departed the Hill and Johnson made the

"Bobby who?" television appearance, Baker said "You remember that story about your

friend in Texas? He damn sure was right." [laughs]

Just one aside on it. Baker subsequently was invited down to the ranch many

years later [in 1972]. In fact Baker and his wife came and stayed at my house. Walter

Jenkins called me from Austin and asked me to come over there and pick them up, that he

was going to be a guest there, and they had requested that I meet them. So I got a car,

went over Austin, picked them up, and gave them a car. And they went on and stayed

with Johnson. And then they came and stayed at our house.

I always ribbed Baker. I said, "Well, did he want to make amends? Or did he just

want to find out how many chapters you're going to do on him in your book?" Bobby

said, "Well, Rein, the

52

guy's dying." And he did die just ninety days or 120 days later. I think it was in

November, and didn't Johnson die along in February or March?

RITCHIE: Right. That was November, '72, I think that Baker went down to the

ranch. Johnson died the next winter.

VANDER ZEE: Just a very short time after. Well, I'm losing the chain of

thought. In any event, this fellow Morrow had told me about his source of dissatisfaction

with Johnson. So, while Wright Morrow to me was a very wonderful man, he had opted

to go with the Shivercrats, which was a wing of the Dixiecrats in that '52 year. And I was

unable, and still would be unable, to fault Johnson as a national office holder to have

caved into that pressure. I think Johnson in the interest not only of his own political

career but the national party simply couldn't. And they failed to understand that. They

thought he ought to do what they told him. So he took a hike on them, or at least Morrow

felt he'd taken a hike. I don't know if they ever did get the hatchet buried. I doubt it.

Too bitter. Real bitter.

Bitterness was not a part of this man, you see; but he was still bitter about that.

RITCHIE: What was your impression of Lyndon Johnson as a person at that

time?

VANDER ZEE: At that time I didn't know him. See, at the time of this

conversation I was telling you about was '53; and I didn't get to know him for seven or

53

eight years later. My first real contact with him was in 1960. After the convention, I

came back to town. Most of us that were out of work went on the Inaugural Committee.

Oh, wait a minute. I've got to back up. The campaign came after the convention.

And in the campaign, Rowe (who had been appointed Kennedy-Johnson liaison) was

responsible for having me appointed—out of his experience with me, he took a liking to

me in the Humphrey campaign—he had me appointed director of scheduling for Johnson.

So I was down working out of the national committee, and handling Johnson's schedule.

That was the year [Richard] Nixon pledged to appear personally in every one of the fifty

states. We realized, or we felt that that was not a thing for our presidential candidate to

do, that we would divide it between the two of them, and let Johnson handle some of the

little low-vote states early on. One of the things we laid on very early after a

conference up in—now when Kennedy was nominated, Johnson as Majority Leader was

in what we called P-38 in those days. I don't know if it is still P-38, but it's that suite of

rooms off the Senate Reception Room.

RITCHIE: Yes. [S-211]

VANDER ZEE: It was just referred to in those days P-38. Anyway, right across

where Joe Stewart is now was Joe Duke's

54

office. Joe Duke was Sergeant at Arms. It was that end of the principal floor that was

occupied by Johnson and Joe Duke. Well, after the nomination, Joe Duke was a pretty

capable politician, he said, "Senator Kennedy, I want you to take my office over and use

it for your office." So Kennedy did. And Rowe and I went up there. Rowe and I and

Dick McGuire were there. I think we were the only ones. After we had formulated a

rough schedule, we went up to the office where Joe Stewart is now, and we sat down with

Senators Kennedy and Johnson and we talked about this schedule. We had set it up for

Johnson to go out to Hawaii very early on, because Hawaii was a three-vote state, and

you would lose a day getting out there and back.

Johnson started demurring, and we couldn't understand why. And he'd already

agreed to this through Rowe. Rowe had been passing the stuff to me. In turn, we had a

vice president—Smith had given us some guy who was a vice president of American

Airlines.

RITCHIE: C. R. Smith, right?

VANDER ZEE: Right. And they had to take a plane out of the fleet. They had

to put beds in it and work it all over. In other words, it would be a plane lost to them as a

revenue producer to be this campaign plane to go out to Hawaii to do all that stuff. We

had committed to that on this basis, and the guy at the time told me, "Now, this has gotta

be." He said, "Are you sure this is for

55

real?" Because, he said, "my ass is mud if for some reason this doesn't come off."

And I said, "Well, I just have it on the authority of Jim Rowe; and he got it from

Johnson that it's a go." Well, when we got in that little scheduling deal, Johnson started

demurring. We didn't know why, but it didn't take long to find out. The Senate was in

session. He called this Senator Long in from off the floor, Senator Long from Hawaii. I

forget his first name.

RITCHIE: Oren.

VANDER ZEE: You got it! Hot damn, you're good. He said, Senator, Oren,

whatever, he said "tell these fellas what you been telling me about the advisability of

going out there to Hawaii in the beginning of the campaign." Naturally, any senator is

going to do this to you. He said, "Well, hell, it's too early." He said, "you're not going to

get any crowds." And this killed Johnson, you know, no crowds. And he gave him all

these reasons why it'd be a lousy deal. And all of them self-serving, because everybody

wants to have the candidate as everybody knows in the last damn week!

But you just couldn't afford the time and all of that to do that. So, after we went

ahead and did the rest of the schedule Johnson asked us to come into P-38. When we got

in there, Walter Jenkins, I guess, was there. Rowe was adamant. He said, "Senator you

committed to the Hawaii trip." He says, "You put a lot of

56

people in a very, very difficult position if you won't live up to it."

Johnson said [in a higher pitched voice], "I didn't agree to that." He said, "Walter,

what did you understand about me going?" And Walter did what Walter had to do, he

hedged. And Rowe said, "Well, Vander Zee, how about you?" I said, "Well, of course, I

made the commitment to American Airlines based on what you conveyed to me that there

was a 'go' deal." From that day forward through that campaign when we left there that

night, I was replaced as director of scheduling. Johnson never spoke to Rowe. They

didn't speak for years. It was several years! And Johnson was back at the White House

before he called Rowe back. Over that. He didn't go! And nobody went, and we carried

Hawaii anyway.

So, that was just an example of the way he is. But Oren Long had convinced him

he just wouldn't even be noticed out there. And that killed that deal. But, oh, I liked him

anyway. I think he was a very vain guy in many ways, but overall, I would approve him,

because I knew where he came from. After all, he came out of the Roosevelt mold, out

of that New Deal. He tried to do all that. He wanted to be another Lincoln. He did his

damnedest with his Great Society, civil rights, and all the rest of that stuff. And, as we all

know, with his knowledge of the Congress and the individuals in the wake of the

Kennedy assassination, it was a rare combination of events there when you could have

passed anything.

Kennedy, on the other hand, was unable to get anything. I don't believe any

Kennedy measures would have gone through the

57

Congress at all the way things were going during his time. You could just see it. The

members weren't going to cooperate with him, even though he was out of their own party.

You could just feel it around the floor. I wasn't privy to the real inside conversations, but

I was back in the cloakroom a lot, and I could hear the members talking and I'd get

feedback from Baker and others. And you could just see it during Kennedy's time. It

was just going to bog down and get to be a tough go. Suddenly, because of his death and

because Johnson had the opposite kind of a thing—he was the professional guy out of the

Senate. Kennedy, you know, was always considered an absentee kind of guy. Not too

dedicated to his work.

Well, it turned around. And here he had this beautiful opportunity to pass any

damn thing he pleased. And he did. Now we all have to debate whether or not it was for

the benefit of the country.

RITCHIE: To go back. He dropped you as in charge of his scheduling then?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. A fellow named Jim Blundell who was a top man for

Bill Blakely out of Texas, I think. He had been brought in. I think Blakely was a major

owner in Braniff Airlines.

RITCHIE: Blakely took Johnson's seat eventually.

VANDER ZEE: He took the appointive seat there until the election when [John]

Tower came in. Jim Blundell came in and took the top scheduling job. They didn't fire

58

me. I was there. I just didn't have the top job any more because I had sided with Rowe.

[laughs] And you know, I didn't know until some years later because Rowe didn't tell

me, the fact that he and Johnson had ceased their communication. And they were good

friends. Rowe was the guy that greeted Johnson into the White House when Johnson

came to Congress in whatever year that was, '37, '38, I guess it was. So their friendship,

their acquaintance went way back. It was ultimately restored. Rowe was working with

Johnson during Johnson's time in the White House.

RITCHIE: A long time ago I went to interview Tommy Corcoran at their law

firm, and I remember I had to wait for an hour in a waiting room that was filled with

pictures of Lyndon Johnson There was not a single other person on the wall except

Lyndon Johnson.

VANDER ZEE: Right. [laughs] Well, I'm sure at various times he relied a lot

on those fellows for their help and their knowledge. You know, Rowe was the inside

man, Corcoran was the outside man. Their story is that Corcoran was so unpredictable

Roosevelt wanted to keep him outside. And he created most of those alphabet soup

agencies during that time. Brilliant guy. When I last saw him he was walking down l6th

Street with his chesterfield

59

on, looking up at the trees, whistling. Seemed like a million miles away.

I have some interesting—are you interested in the so-called insider episodes?

RITCHIE: Um-hummm.

VANDER ZEE: Well, after the Bobby Baker thing, I went downtown and

started practicing law the next year. I saw that there wasn't going to be any place for me

there. Senator Mansfield was pretty much—what is the correct word?—he was shocked

by the whole Baker thing, because he relied heavily on just leaving everything as it was.

And when that happened, he, well, didn't know what to do for awhile. But I could read

the tea leaves rather quickly that my days were limited, and my intentions all along had

been to depart. I'd received my law degree from Georgetown and passed the D.C. bar

just prior to the end of the year. I planned to depart in early '64 anyway. But because of

the Baker thing and because I was assistant secretary, we were all subject to being tarred

with the same brush. Reporters were running all over the Hill trying to get the goods on

everybody about some kind of wrong doing.

I seldom went to the offices that we had over in the West Front. But I went down

one day to a desk that was mine and I had a key to, and the desk had been pried open with

some kind of a tool. The lock had been broken. I looked down, and I couldn't see

60

that anything was missing. I didn't have that much stuff there. But later on a friend of

mine came around, Bob Novak, who at that time, I think, was with the Wall Street

Journal, I forget. But he came around, and he said, "Rein, I think you ought to know—

you've been a friend, and you've helped me—and I think you ought to know," he said, "I

can't identify them for you, I'm not going to, but somebody's trying to peddle a piece of

goods on you. A reporter is trying to do this," and he said "I wouldn't touch it; but others

might; and I think you ought to at least be aware of it."

Well, what I subsequently learned was that one of the things that had been taken

from my desk was a personal letter from a guy named Joe Reber in Montana. Joe Reber

was a party guy out there. He was very successful. He'd been a plumber out of Butte and

Anaconda. Anaconda was the name of this little town by Butte. He had come out of that

area. Anyway, we were friends, and Joe had become very wealthy for his time and day

because he had gotten to be such a good plumber, he was plumbing the holes in

Malmstrom Air Force Base missile silos. And this made him a fairly substantial citizen.

One time Joe was in town, and I ran into him, I think it was at the Carroll Arms.

And he said, "Rein, do you have any friends in Boeing?" Well, I said, "My gosh, that's

something I don't have any contact with." I said, "I don't work on those committees. I

think I know one or two guys around town that are identified as being Boeing lobbyists."

And he said, "Well, if you ever have

61

occasion to say a good word for me, I'd sure like to get some more of those subcontracts."

That was the end of it, just a conversation like that. [laughs] Well, he

subsequently wrote me a letter—just a handwritten note. Said "good to see you in

Washington. How's the folks. La dee da. And, by the way, if you ever run into those

people from Boeing, how about putting in a good word for me." [laughs] Well, now,

Sarah McClendon. There was an old gal named Grace somebody who was an old timer

around here. And she had keys to a lot of the things around the Capitol.

RITCHIE: Oh, Grace Johnson.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Yeah. You got it.

RITCHIE: She worked on the Rules Committee, didn't she?

VANDER ZEE: I don't know what she did, but she was reputed to have been a

girl friend of both [Allen] Ellender's and [Carl] Hayden's. And so Joe Duke wouldn't

mess with her. He knew she was running around with a bunch of keys to get in a lot of

these places. So, apparently, she'd let Sarah in, and they busted some desks, and mine

was one of them. So Sarah was the one that had this, and she must have thought: Boy I

got this guy, he's fixing missile contracts! And that's what she's peddling. I told you I

had to stick around a few months past the time I wanted to because

62

of the Baker investigation. Senator Jordan's AA had me over, and I sat down with

Senator Jordan and Bill [Cochrane]. And I said, "Gentlemen, I've been trying to leave the

Hill to go downtown to practice law. But nobody will tell me that I'm not going to be

called as a witness before the committee because I was Bobby's assistant. And I don't

want to send out my announcements opening my law practice and have my first public

act to be to come up here and testify before the Committee as if I'm under some cloud of

suspicion."

And they said, "Well, you really aren't, Rein, except somebody's trying to say

you're fixing missile contracts." [laughs] This how crazy those things get, you know? So

Senator Jordan said to me, "Rein, how would you go about fixing a missile contract?" I

said, "Well, Senator, you just answered the question. It's ridiculous." By that time I

knew about the letter, and I told him what I thought had happened. And that's where it all

came from. So it died out. But it gets so crazy around this place when that kind of thing

is going on. And somehow, someday, I hope that the people who are sent here by the

public will take control of their damned institution and quit letting the newsies and a

bunch of other people run it for them. Until that happens, I don't see much hope for the

future of the republic from what I've been a witness to or participant in.

So, naturally, when things like that happen, ultimately there's nothing to it. But

they get drug around for weeks and months, and it creates a lot of uncertainty, but finally

I just

63

said, "Well, hell, I'm going on downtown and get after it." And did. And that was the

end of it.

RITCHIE: They never did call you back to testify?

VANDER ZEE: No, I was never called as a witness.

RITCHIE: Could we still go back. I'm curious about that 1960 campaign after

the incident with Johnson. What did you do for the remainder of the campaign?

VANDER ZEE: Well, I continued to work on his scheduling department and

then, when I saw that I had been shuffled off to Buffalo, I just went on the road doing

advance work for Kennedy.

RITCHIE: Did you do any of that famous southern tour that he did? The

whistle-stopping?

VANDER ZEE: No, that was all Bobby's show. That was something laid on

early because Bobby promoted the hell out of it, and Johnson went for it. I know at the

end of it there was a lot of friction. Johnson made everybody sick on the damn trip.

Baker finally told him off, I understand, down at the Roosevelt [Hotel] in New Orleans.

Apparently they were having a little gathering, cocktails, what have you, appetizers.

Johnson came in, and everybody kind of turned their backs. The story I got is second-

64

hand story. Bud Lucky, the guy with [George] Smathers, was there. He was working on

it. Baker can't drink, he's quit drinking today. He doesn't drink any more. It's impossible

for him to. It was impossible for him to then. He shouldn't have been doing it. Some

guys can; some guys can't.

But he'd had a couple of shooters, and everybody, you know, in those situations

you're always exhausted. So Johnson took him aside and said something like, "Bobby

why is everybody treatin' me the way they are?" Bobby was supposed to have said,

"Because you're a chicken shit son-of-a-bitch!" [laughs] And I imagine that happened.

[laughs] I wasn't there to hear it, but that was reported to me as what took place.

No, I didn't have part in it, but I was part of setting it up. We blocked out the time

for it. But we kind of just turned that over to Baker—we assigned the advance guys to

work with them. So, anyway, I did advance jobs. I advanced their only joint appearance,

I recall, it's peculiar, as I told you, we made this effort to have them always cover

everything by part. But Kennedy and Johnson had one joint appearance, and it was

Johnson's desire to have it. I advanced his part of it along with one other guy, Bill Lloyd.

In Amarillo, Texas of all peculiar places. Of course Amarillo, that's where Republicanism

was born in the state of Texas in the modern era. And it was a center, in Johnson's way

of thought, for right-wing types. So I advanced that with Bill. And they flew in, each in

their own planes and landed there and made this joint appearance. Just an airport

appearance.

65

It was a great embarrassment for me—in fact it was Bill Blakely's airline, I think,

that did this to us. Braniff? Anyway, Amarillo had a fairly active airport there. I asked

the airport manager there if while the candidates were on the ground—it was just going to

be a grandstand, loud speakers, crowd would be on the outside the fence on the apron—if

they could just hold off having any landings or takeoffs for a few minutes. He indicated

that they could do that.

But these guys out of Dallas, these pilots, when Kennedy and Johnson got there,

they went out and got in their goddamn planes and wound their engines up. I mean, did it

on purpose! I remember Kennedy saying, "Boy this is the noisiest airport I've ever been

in." Those guys were doing just a straight harassment effort. It was a pain in the ass. It

kind of ruined the appearance. Which goes to show that when you get in that kind of a

situation, no more would I take anybody's word. I'd have to do something to assure that

they would be turning them off. But these weren't their people. They were going to do

everything they could to embarrass them.

RITCHIE: There's a famous picture, and I wonder whether it was taken at that

stop. Kennedy is standing on the steps of the plane, and Johnson is two or three steps

below him. Johnson seems to be shouting off in the distance, and Kennedy has his hands

on his shoulder and seems to be saying, "Calm down, Lyndon."

66

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmmm. I have a hunch that I'm right in front of them in

the picture because I went aboard the plane to give them a little briefing and tell them

what we were going to do. So I probably walked off right ahead. But I know the one you

mean. I've seen it. In fact, I think I've got it at home, and I think Johnson when he was

veep he signed it for me up on the dais one day there at the Senate. And I think he did it

with a damned felt tip, which has just about faded out so you can't see it any more. But

anyway.

RITCHIE: That picture seemed to capture the difference in personalities

between the two men. In fact, when I was a student in the 1960s I had a copy of that

picture pasted up on the wall over my desk.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Yeah, that's the picture. You described it very well. I

got a Burr hair cut in those days. Bill Lloyd and I both, the other advance man.

RITCHIE: The election was over. The Democrats had won. You came back

and joined the inaugural committee, did you say?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Then I finished out the year working on the inaugural

committee. In those days—well, same today—I didn't have two nickels to rub together.

I was always looking for a payroll and couldn't do without one. So my gang, more or

less, we

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all worked on the inaugural committee. Bob Burkhart from New Jersey was running it

that year. Well, he was the executive director and there was a lawyer downtown. He was

chairman. Again, I can't recall the name at the moment.

The job was get it put together. We did that. Then I again was going to be in

limbo for employment for the following year. So, when I saw things in the very

beginning of '61 after the—well, the inauguration wasn't until the 20th of January.

RITCHIE: There was a huge snow storm just the day before the inauguration.

VANDER ZEE: Oh, God! So as we were moving toward that the Senate had its

early meeting there and it became apparent that Humphrey was going to take the whip

slot. He told me so. I mean we were talking fairly regularly. Well, I hit him up for a job.

I said "Rather than try to be in the executive branch, I'd like to stay up here on the Hill.

And if you're going to take that new job and you haven't got the spot for anybody else to

take it, I'd like to have it." And he wound up giving it to me. He said, "I liked what you

did for me in West Virginia and I'd like you to continue." He said, "Now we've got a little

national political constituency, and I'd like you to handle my national politics." He had

me working basically on that and—a strange combination—on agriculture. That was

always a thing he had to stay close to. So he had me doing those two things. And taking

care of that little

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office of keeping in touch with the things right there that involved the whip office.

I did that then for '61, all that year. And I was back in law school at nights. As

soon as we finished a day I would whip down there to 7th and E or wherever it was then.

Then at the beginning of '62 there was a fellow that was Bobby's assistant. Damn I can't

remember. Jay somebody [Jessop McDonnell]. He was assistant secretary. Jay, for

whatever reasons, he and Bobby had gotten on the outs. Jay was a pal of [Edmund]

Muskie's and this girl's boss, [Gale] McGee, and some others. But, anyway, it wound up

they canned him. They had to have somebody for that job, so Humphrey thought it

would be appropriate if I worked down there. So I went down to the floor.

For me, I kind of liked it better because I was intent on getting that law degree.

This is where I fell short as a Hill guy, and why I wasn't immersed more in policy and

things like that. I was going after that degree, and the little job there on the floor went a

hell of a lot better with my studies than having an immersion-type job here where you're

working late and having to get papers ready and all that. It was pretty much a come-and-

go-type job.

We had a couple of good men over there. Joe Stewart was one of them, and Dick

Darling who ran our telephones in the cloakroom, were good about covering if you were

away. So I was able to make class every evening. There was no paperwork burden, you

know, things they do over there. We would record the votes, make sure the

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members were informed when they came to the floor about why the bells were ringing

and what was going on. Supervise the page boys, all that stuff that orbits around the floor

there.

Bobby was very preoccupied. As we came to know later, he was doing a lot of

stuff for Senator [Robert] Kerr, and probably others. He had his own problems. He had

those outside investments he was working on, and the damn motel washing away in

Ocean City—like I guess it nearly did again recently. He had a lot of headaches that

were distracting him. So he wasn't at the floor a whole lot. Joe [Stewart] and I kind of

rode herd on that thing together during those two or three years.

Mansfield left us alone. Of course, on the policy committee, we had Harry

McPherson and his sidekick whoever he was at that time.

RITCHIE: Jerry Siegel, maybe?

VANDER ZEE: No, Jerry had gone already. I think there might have been a

Ken Teasdale showed up around that time. I remember his name. And another guy.

Charlie somebody . . . .

RITCHIE: Charlie Ferris.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah! Charlie was around during that time. But it was

basically a very good time. I don't remember anybody having a long knife out. I

understand a lot of that type of stuff started

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happening around here later on. People liked their bosses. Their bosses liked them.

There was a great deal of staff camaraderie, across the aisle as well as with your own side

of the aisle. I guess Oliver Dompierre was as good a pal as I ever had on the Hill. And

Billy Brownrigg. I knew Mark, but Mark and I didn't spend that much time together.

RITCHIE: Mark Trice?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Mark Trice. Billy and I, and Oliver and I used to go

down and have had a shooter with his boss, sometimes in the evening. Everybody liked

Senator Dirksen. He was a good guy. Then my two best staff friends—both Skeeter

[Felton Johnston] and Joe Duke. Joe Duke, subsequently, after he retired and was in

Arizona, he came down to Texas and bought a piece of land from me and built a home,

and was my neighbor. He didn't stay but a year, he and his wife. It was his intention

when he came, but apparently she developed some allergies or had some arthritic

condition that was aggravated down in that part of Texas. So they moved back to

Arizona.

But I still call him. I didn't call him this Christmas, but I call Joe at least once a

year to see how he's doing. Those kind of friendships, you never lose them. I was a

rookie when I showed up around here. Joe took me under his wing and just anything he

could do to help me and my boss, it seemed like he was always there to do it. Why? I

mean, he didn't have to. And you appreciate

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those things. I realize that's a lot of what politics around here runs on. But out of it also

grows strong, personal friendships. I still have.

RITCHIE: Well, you started out with Humphrey when he was whip. What

types of things would you do for him when he was the whip?

VANDER ZEE: Well, of course, the main thing was just keep track of the floor

so he'd know, too; because every day there would be whip notices to generate about

something. So he'd been informed and could always talk to people on his side of the

aisle, fulfill his responsibilities.

As I recall, that wasn't a big deal because everybody was fairly well aware of

what was going on. But you were his eyes and ears around the Hill as it affected his job

there. One thing that I recall was when Kennedy nominated—this is a "for instance"

where you're asked to perform a service—Kennedy nominated John Connally to be

Secretary of the Navy at the behest, of course, of Lyndon Johnson. We have to assume

that, I feel it's unquestioned. And it became apparent that the usual guys who were

against that "bunch of damned rich Texas oil men and wheeler-dealer politicians" were

going to try to create some problems for the nomination. And, of course, mainly those

would be Senator [William] Proxmire and [Paul] Douglas and maybe some others.

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But we were asked by—well, Humphrey was specifically asked by Johnson to see

if he could keep a rein on those folks. We got Humphrey up to the task. I remember

sitting down in Bobby's office there with Connally. I don't recall if he provided us with

paperwork. But anyway, my job was to make sure Humphrey had everything he needed

to hold the fort there on that particular day and that particular nomination. As I recall, it

never got to be real tough. I think there was some indication there was going to a fight,

and then it kind of all blew over. Proxmire and them decided not to make a big cause

celebre out of it.

RITCHIE: So you kept Humphrey informed so that he could know what to

expect?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Things like that. That was more or less coordination

between Baker and I. Baker from Johnson, then back to Humphrey because he was the

administration guy. He was assistant leader. He was the liberal, and part of his job was

to keep other liberals in the boat.

RITCHIE: What was the relationship between Senator Humphrey as whip and

Senator Mansfield as majority leader?

VANDER ZEE: Well, they'd sit there and talk about things. I don't think they

had—I could be wrong about this—but I don't recall them having many meetings off the

floor or outside the

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floor. I don't think they went and huddled in each other's office. I know Mansfield never

came in ours, and I don't think Humphrey was in Mansfield's very much.

At this time, now, when Mansfield came in as majority leader, he left P-38 [S2-

211] over there with Johnson. Johnson kept it for the veep office. A lot of people fussed

about that, and thought he was overstepping. But Mansfield went into that office I told

you Kennedy had occupied which had been Joe Duke's. Joe went across on the west side

and set up his office. And Humphrey had the little third-floor office above where Stewart

is now. That was the whip office.

You had mentioned earlier the inaugural speech and Kennedy and that cold spell.

I remember it well because by this time I was signed on with Humphrey, and he told me,

he said, "Rein, I told some friends of ours from Minnesota that don't want to brave the

cold to come up there." So he gave me the names or told me the names. And there were

a handful of them watching up there, which was the best seat in the house, I think.

Among them, was a guy named Joe Robbie who at that time was a lawyer in

Minneapolis. He's dead now, but he became the owner, you know, of the Miami

Dolphins. He built his own football stadium and named it after himself. Joe was in those

days just a practicing attorney in Minnesota, but he apparently had been a friend of

Humphrey's for a lot of years. I don't remember who all else was there. I just remember

Robbie and one or two of his children.

74

RITCHIE: A lot warmer in there than standing outside.

VANDER ZEE: Oh, wonderful! We just stood around there. Nice windows,

you know, so we stood there and watched. Everybody had a good view. It was a bitter

cold day.

RITCHIE: The reason I asked about the differences between Humphrey and

Mansfield was when Johnson was majority leader he didn't give much slack to Mansfield

as his whip at all. Mansfield was probably not cut in on what was going on. And now

when Mansfield took over, he was a very different person. I wondered if the whip's job

suddenly became more active, took more of a lead under Humphrey than it would have

been earlier on.

VANDER ZEE: Well, of course it's been well recorded what you say about

Johnson and Mansfield when he was whip. I think I remember Rowe's analysis was that

Johnson wanted to have somebody that wouldn't give him trouble, that would go along

with everything and would not be an obstacle or source of dissent. You've got to

remember at that time the population of Montana wasn't half a million. I don't think it

was 500,000. So, you know, he looked around, here's this nice guy and so it worked out

well. I'm sure Johnson would be the last person in the world to have been able to tell that

Mansfield would later set the longevity record as majority leader. Because it was the

kind of a case of having somebody in name only.

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But, apparently, the way Mansfield read the Johnson years was that the committee

chairmen were rankling somewhat, they didn't particularly like to be steam-rollered.

They didn't like to have their staff people bought off or persuaded off—not bought off

literally, but you know what I'm saying—to move stuff out of committee when they

weren't ready. This is just after the fact, I kind of was led to understand that that was

standard tactics. He'd just surround you and make it happen.

Mansfield thought it would be a good idea for him to go back to where the old

committee chairmen were almost autonomous in their domain. So he reextended them

that type of courtesy—if that's the proper word. And I guess they loved it! You had

[Richard] Russell in Armed Services. You had I forget what committee Ellender had.

RITCHIE: Agriculture, I think.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah, got that right. You had Dennis Chavez over there on

Appropriations.

RITCHIE: [Harry] Byrd was chairman of Finance.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Byrd and subsequently—well when did Kerr take over?

Kerr was just on Finance.

RITCHIE: Yes. He was the number two man.

76

VANDER ZEE: Right. Ranking member. My hindsight would be that there

was a completely separate power group. And I recall telling Humphrey this. I said,

"Senator, you and Mansfield have the titles in this operation here. But, I said, there is a

very separate force going on. It's pretty potent." And it was Kerr. Kerr had huge

financial resources, and he didn't mind helping Republican members. He didn't care

where the votes came from. Hell, just so he had them! And I think it's pretty well known

now that he spread it around, and when some critical issues important to him came up, he

managed to most times—if not all times—to get his vote. And he got it off both sides of

the aisle. Of course Bobby was providing assistance there.

I think to some extent, I think without question, Senator Dirksen provided a lot of

assistance there by probably directing or cooperating or at least having knowledge of

where the where-with-all was going sometimes on that side of the aisle.

Maybe they knew. Maybe they knew in their heart of hearts that this was the

case. But certainly there was an element there of influence in the affairs of the Senate.

Whether it existed before—probably it hadn't back in history, but it was sure there then.

The famous vote that made everybody almost drop their false teeth was on the

Medicare vote where Jennings Randolph suddenly out of the blue, very contrary to

expectations, voted against it. This was something Kerr was against, and Jennings

Randolph voted with

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him. There was an almost audible gasp. It was one of those hold-back votes until late in

the voting from the group assembled.

RITCHIE: Can you describe Kerr to me? He seemed like such a larger-than-life

figure.

VANDER ZEE: I can't say I was even remotely an intimate acquaintance of the

gentleman, but he used to frequently come by the desk. About all he'd said was "Where's

Baker?" If I knew, I'd tell him. In retrospect I have known people who worked for him

closely—Bill Reynolds. I know a fella who was an Oklahoman who never worked

directly for him but pretty close to him, named Carl Davis, a retired attorney in NASA. I

think he was over at NASA and was liaison to the Hill for NASA. He's a fella that

commanded fierce loyalty from his people. He obviously took great personal interest in

them and with his resources, I'm sure he was able to probably do things for them

personally that your average member wouldn't be able to. He was a man that more or

less played by his own rules, because that's the way it was. You've got to remember

where these fellas came from. I think in my life, your life, that those early influences are

just something you don't shake off.:

I have one side of my family that came out of the Indian territory of Oklahoma,

and you made do for yourself. If you could make it happen, you made it happen. There

weren't any rules. There weren't any rule books about how you did it. I think that this

man was no more or less than a product of that time and that

78

territory. As he used to say on the floor, he'd say, "Every time we get up and have a vote

on some of these matters affecting oil and cattle, he said I'm accused of being a big, rich

oil man from Oklahoma," and he said "they prove it on me every time." [laughs] In other

words, he wasn't an apologist for it. It was just the way it was. And I think that was his

whole approach to life. Baker always said he killed himself eating ice cream. He

apparently was constantly eating ice cream. We all know now what that will do to your

plumbing.

And he was a fellow who knew how to go about getting what he wanted. I'm not

sure in the final analysis that that's all bad, any more than I'm sure that the way we used

to do in politics, which was you just went out and got money. They've got all these

finance laws now and, I mean, it's crazy. And it doesn't seem to improve the situation a

hell of a lot. You've got all this record-keeping and reporting and everybody is going to

put everybody in jail. It just gets crazy! Why should there be all that?

They did it to themselves. But you can't ever ultimately solve it all with rule

making. I'm not too sure that it's not best the way the old system was. Somebody's got a

zillion dollars and they want to give a zillion dollars to this guy to go into public office,

then, hell, he just got lucky. I'm not too sure that's bad because look what the PACs thing

has done. It seems to have diluted the public's interest even further—well, you wonder

what happened to the old average guy. Where does the average citizen come off out

there in this thing? They're not doin' too well.

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As I say, I never knew the senator personally well enough to really comment

about him. It was just second-hand stuff from Baker. Baker and I retain a personal

friendship, have through the years. He's been in my home in Texas a few times. I see

him when I come to Washington as a rule. He's six months younger than I am, but he's

pretty thoroughly retired. He has a lot of good stories he could still tell about those years.

But I don't know if anybody's interested any more.

RITCHIE: I'd like to interview him some time.

VANDER ZEE: He probably waited too long to write his little book. In fact I

had a hand in putting him together with Larry L. King—not the television interviewer but

Larry Leo King from Texas—because I could sense that if Bobby was left to his own

devices he had too many preoccupations to sit down and write a book. He needed

somebody to put the pen to the paper, the keys to the paper. So I got him and King

together and they made a deal. I don't think the book was any great success. To me, it

emphasized too much, they wanted to do a sensational type-thing and promote sales, so

they named it something about the wheeler-dealer.

RITCHIE: Wheeling and Dealing

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. And Larry had to always get in on what I call

unnecessary profanity and unseemly kind of thing. Well, we

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all know it's there; but why the hell emphasize it in a piece of literature. There's more

important things. He's still got my typewriter that he took. I've never seen it since.

[laughs] Ate all the chili that I had in the place. I was back here for a few months. Had

an apartment rented downtown at the time that they got together and did that back in the

mid-seventies.

But by the time he finally got it finished—hell, the way the world goes now, just

like the mention of what athlete was the Hubert H. Humphrey stadium named after. A

few years passed and it was too late. Nobody knows anymore. The public memory of

this country is very short, very shallow. Everybody is too damn busy trying to get back

and forth to work and to get their groceries to be very enlightened.

RITCHIE: As a historian, I have to agree with you.

End of Interview #1

Interview Two

Tuesday, January 28, 1992

RITCHIE: When we left off this morning, you were working for Hubert

Humphrey, and you were assisting him when he was the Democratic Whip. This was just

before you went to the office of the secretary of the Democratic majority. I wonder if you

could give me some description of the Senate at that stage. What was the pace of life of a

person on the Senate floor? You were taking classes at night, but what would be an

average day, when you were working for Humphrey?

VANDER ZEE: Well, you mean as a member of the majority leader's staff after

I'd left his personal staff as Senate whip in '61 I went down to the floor.

RITCHIE: Well, tell me about being with him as whip and how it would have

changed when you went down on the floor.

VANDER ZEE: Right. I did have some more or less administrative and policy

responsibilities with respect to Humphrey's personal politics; the Senate whip operation

and in this case, as I told you, agriculture, because it was so important to him in his home

state. Down on the floor it became more or less just a housekeeping type of thing. I

wasn't with policy. The policy committee, that was Harry [McPherson] and Ken

Teasdale and

82

Charlie Ferris. I was under Baker's direct supervision. He was secretary of the majority

at that time. Had been since Lyndon Johnson became majority leader, I think. Johnson

became minority leader the first go 'round, as I recall, during Eisenhower's first term.

RITCHIE: During 1953-'54.

VANDER ZEE: Uh, huh. And then when they reassumed the majority, then

Baker was elevated to majority secretary. He had quite a record as being an effective

guy. He told me, "Your assignment is just to assist me. I'd like for you to stay up on the

floor as much as possible, work for the majority leader and the whip, supervise the

operation up there," which included the page boys, cloakroom basically. I personally,

more or less, had the duty to record the votes. Joe and I usually did it together to double-

check one another as the roll call was being taken. And, of course, the roll call clerk also

took his. But we reported those to the—I guess it was the policy committee staff that

kept the permanent voting records of the Democrats? So that is who we did it for. That

was our responsibility to take and record an accurate vote, and the members who had to

be absent, or for their own reasons had to ask for pairs. We'd keep records of that, record

it all and carry it into, I think it was a Mrs. Moore who kept all those records for the

majority. These became permanent records.

83

You know the old "revise and extend" thing that has been often criticized in both

houses of Congress by the media and so forth. But, I didn't have any trouble with it.

Because in the Senate I never saw anybody abuse it. I didn't think to the extent of it

being called abuse. Many of the members would either make an extemporaneous speech;

or even if they had a written speech, after the fact, they'd want to come around and look

at their copy, and sometimes revise and extend by putting in new copy. I was always

amused at a great gentleman, Senator John Stennis from Mississippi. He always seemed

so apologetic. He said, "You know, I really hate to ask you to do this, but you know."

[laughs] He was a guy you couldn't say no, too, anyway, even if you wanted to. He was

such a gent.

So we took care of those kind of matters. Like I say, it was housekeeping. I guess

one of the most important functions was when roll calls were called—in the old days,

prior to Senator Mansfield taking over, and it kind of carried over. And the I suppose

Senator Mansfield's desire was not to have members told of the leadership position unless

it was some matter that was extremely important. I guess it had become routine under

Johnson that on every vote the leadership position was given to the members when they

came to the floor. And, of course, they were expected to vote that way.

Whether Baker was just used to doing it that way or what, we did start out with that.

But during my time there that kind of eased up. In fact, I think before I left we were

instructed never

84

to give the leadership position on a bill unless a member requested it. Maybe there had

been some static from members themselves. Well, it continued—there were certain

members that not only insisted on it, they didn't want you to take up the time to explain it.

All they asked for was a thumb up or a thumb down or a yea or nay as they walked in.

They didn't want to know what the issue was. They had sufficient confidence in the staff

that the staff would know how they should vote.

These were admittedly what you might call your "automatics." I mean, they were

people who almost always did vote with the majority leader on any given issue. That was

it more or less it, housekeeping. We had to see to the physical housekeeping, make sure

that everything was in order every day. The [page] boys filled the old snuff boxes, and

the old inkwells. We just had to keep everything tidy and neat and, of course, make sure

that the boys kept themselves shaped up so they run their errands properly and conduct

themselves properly in front of the members.

RITCHIE: You spent most of your time in the cloakroom?

VANDER ZEE: In the cloakroom and at the desk in the corner that is reserved—I

think, still is—for the assistant secretary on both sides. There is a seating arrangement on

the dais, which I frankly don't remember but during ceremonial functions, which were

rare, I think during opening day sessions of new Congress was about the only time where

the actual staff members would take their seats

85

on the dais. And during those days, I was the lowest on the totem pole, but there was a

seat up there for the secretary and assistant secretary for the majority along with the ones

you find, the parliamentarian and all the other Senate officers. And when business was

routine or even non-routine nobody ever occupied the dais except the presiding officer

and those that necessarily had to be there. The parliamentarian, and his staff, and the

roll-call clerk.

RITCHIE: Did you do much head-counting for the majority leader?

VANDER ZEE: I didn't personally. There was some of that, again, early on; but

that also started to decline under Senator Mansfield. It wasn't the big thing it had been, to

try to predict the outcome of the vote. That had gotten to be a kind of a game, I think,

before under Johnson and Baker to be able to predict their head counts. You know they

had this reputation of being very good at it, knowing how everything was going to turn

out, knowing what the results were going to be. But that fell into disfavor.

RITCHIE: Did Baker sort of give you his assessment of the senators these are the

"automatics," these are the uncertains? I get the sense that he really had a peg on

everybody who was there. Did he let you in on his observations with that?

86

VANDER ZEE: We really didn't have that much time. He was a constant-motion

guy. And I could tell he depended on me to cover the floor and free him up to get on

down to the office or whatever he was doing. As I say, he spent a lot of time with

Senator Kerr. Not always in the office. They weren't out of sight. Sometimes they

would just go out and sit in the window seats off the floor. But they conferred a lot.

So I saw my duty just to be there, and make sure there were no problems, and to let

him know if there were any problems. And, in turn, as I said, Joe Stewart and Dickie

Darling, who ran our telephone cloakroom were very generous with me because they

knew I was in law school.

I think Joe might have still been at American [University]. And Senator Bob Byrd

was down at American. We were all in law school at the same time.

RITCHIE: Senator Byrd got his degree in '63, and I think that's when Joe did, too.

VANDER ZEE: Yep. Well, I got mine in the spring of '63. Took my bar in the

summer, and I got the result about October or November '63. That's why I was ready to

go on into private life. Then we had the assassination.

Well, first we had the Baker thing. The Baker thing blew up about October. A

month later the president was assassinated. Then we had to follow along both of those.

Johnson, of course, was

87

gone, where he had been around all the time. He liked to spend time on the Hill. As I

mentioned, he kept P-38, and, I think, really considered it his base.

After Bobby's trouble started—this was still while Johnson was vice president in

that interim before the president was killed. Every day, I know he polled me, and I also

know it wasn't the only one he was polling. He'd be polling around the staff guys to find

out what the members were saying. Just an interesting aside. Along in that period, Harry

McPherson was appointed to some job over in the Defense Department. I forget the title

that he had. But upon his departure, Senator Russell, who was chairman of the policy

committee, got up on the floor to say nice things about Harry. I think others did, too.

But Senator Russell being the boss of policy committee where Harry worked would be

the principal one paying tribute to Harry and his work.

In the course of that, Johnson motioned me over—he was in the presiding officer's

chair—he motioned, he said, "Now Rein I want you to listen to this. Now here's a boy—

Harry McPherson, here—from Tyler, Texas." He said, "I brought him up here. I put him

on the policy committee." And he went on and on with the identification he had with

Harry, and Harry being his boy. "Now here is Senator Russell down there on the floor

saying what a great man he is." [laughs] He said, "On the other hand, when I came here

Bobby Baker was working here," and I forget the Senator from South Carolina who

brought Bobby up. I'd know it if I heard it. But

88

RITCHIE: Maybank?

VANDER ZEE: It was [Burnet] Maybank. And he went on about the fact that

Bobby was in place. All he did was leave him where he was. And he says, "Then he gets

in trouble." He says, "Everybody says he's my boy. But they don't say anything about

Harry McPherson being my boy." [laughs] Typical Johnson stuff. He was just venting

his spleen to one guy that day while the speech was going on. And then later he did the

"Bobby who?" bit while he was down at the White House and Baker's apparent troubles

seemed to grow more complicated and deepened.

Actually, when it was all over, as I said, it wasn't exactly a tempest in a teapot. But

it was a hell of a press party. I don't really to this day, I don't know of anybody, maybe

even including those who were involved in the investigation and the ultimate trial, who

could tell you exactly what Baker's misdeeds were.

It just seems, if I had to characterize it, I'd say he was doing too damn many things

beside his government job. And they exacted a price for that, ultimately. Again, harking

back to the so-called good old days, I referred earlier to Hoover, maybe we need more of

the atmosphere in which people can function freely and make things happen. We seemed

to have so constrained everybody that they can't do a damn thing. Everybody is boxed in.

That may be a big part of the overall frustration with government that we see today. I

don't know that it is. I can't prove any of this,

89

but I suspect it. We're witnessing now the Governor [Bill] Clinton affair. And these

things just keep people away from government. They not only hurt the government, the

image of government, its institutions, its people, with the public but then they keep

people who might participate out. They never try, and that's sad.

RITCHIE: You talk about frustration in government. At the time you were there,

in the majority secretary's office, there was certain frustration in the Democratic party.

They were the majority party in the Senate and House. They had elected a president.

The president had ambitious program. But he had a lot of trouble getting anything

enacted.

VANDER ZEE: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the atmosphere of frustration was

growing more. You could just feel it coming down like a cloud every day that passed up

until the very moment of the president's death. It was going to be a bad time. No

question about that! And the Democratic party was going to take the rap because, isn't

that the last—no, under [Jimmy] Carter we had a government that was not divided. But

ever since Carter we've had divided government. I think this is a time when we could use

the British system and fix that responsibility, because unfixed it just heightens the public

frustration with government's non-performance. It gives both sides the copout that "but

for" that bunch of clowns, we could do this and that and the other. I don't know when the

American public is going to wise up.

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I attribute it to the television set, the television era; and the parallel collapse of the

old party system where your people came up through the crucible of ward politics. And

by the time they bubbled up to the top—let's face it, they were the Harry Trumans, they

were tried and tested. If they were foul balls, chances are they would have been

eliminated long before they got to that level.

And nowadays with the TV set, they send the foul balls straight into you. They

come into the House, the Senate, wherever. I think if we could get back to the old

system, it might have been a better one. But, you know, you've got to deal with reality.

And the reality is it is a so-called beauty contest.

RITCHIE: You had a lot of very conservative Democratic chairmen during that

period, didn't you? A lot of southern Democrats who were chairing the committees.

VANDER ZEE: Gosh, yes. You had Ellender. You had Stennis. You had

[James] Eastland. I guess, you had Lister Hill—who wasn't so terribly conservative

except on civil rights, he had to be, I guess. Jim Rowe told me one time he thought Lister

Hill would have been one of the all-time greats if it hadn't been for that damn civil-rights

yoke. Or race yoke—whatever you want to call it.

I would have to look back. My memory doesn't serve. Senator Russell. Warren

Magnuson. Well, not highly conservative but

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certainly not a wild-eyed liberal. Well, as I said, I'd have to look back.

RITCHIE: But the party was not united.

VANDER ZEE: No, anything but. I wouldn't say that there was open animosity,

but there were schisms, sure there were. At this time, I think there was no question but

that the southern members who had in the past been unable to go along with the civil

rights movement more or less became neutralized. I don't know if President Kennedy's

assassination, Johnson's ascendancy, all that thing we discussed earlier, was a big part of

it. And they were going to give President Johnson what he wanted. They didn't want to

be against him. Those that didn't vote with him, I guess, were just neutralized.

I don't remember actually how those votes were taken. But that was a big shift, and

we can see the results that it's wrought all across the South. I don't know if it's

completely civil rights. I think that when South came out of the Second World War,

there was a lot of new and varied economic activity that also brought about big change

down there. I guess from what I read Mississippi has been the most resistant to change.

And, of course, in recent times the oil thing has certainly played hell economically with

Mississippi, Louisiana. As we know, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma.

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I don't personally recall, was it Senator Fulbright? No, he got beat—I think finally

the Israeli thing, there was a lot of eastern money that went out there to help defeat

Senator Fulbright because he spoke out on what he thought some of the inequities out

there in the Mideast.

Am I right about that?

RITCHIE: I think he certainly feels that way.

VANDER ZEE: So I've got to confess, Don, I'm not the thorough-going student. I

guess I was so enmeshed in the events—breaking events, and my studies. And, as I say,

being involved not so much in a policy job as a functionaries job, that I maybe didn't

absorb all I should have at that time. I'm a fair reader, and I've tried to enlighten myself

in subsequent years.

RITCHIE: Did you have a sense that Johnson was doing much lobbying for the

Kennedy administration? When he was vice president, did he try to promote Kennedy's

programs?

VANDER ZEE: I think he was a definite plus, and a definite help around the

Senate in particular, I don't know about the House, perhaps there too, insofar as the

Kennedy program went. But, breaking his back? Probably not.

I think he was doing all he thought a vice president could and should do. I don't

think he was slacking on the task. But I

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believe that when Johnson was no longer the majority leader and was the vice president

that he simply could not exercise any leverage on those old members that didn't want to

go with him. There was during that period, the thing I referred to, where these members

were taking back what they considered to be their rightful territory, and their committees,

and their authority with respect to those committees and what they did.

The combination of it just added up to not a very bright outlook for the Kennedy

program, such as it was. One thing I remember that did go fairly well on and, I think,

was regarded as being the proper thing to do and very beneficial for the country; and that

was the investment tax credit. And, I guess, Senator Kerr went along with that. As I

recall, there may have been many others; but that was one of the real pluses put in place

early on in the Kennedy thing to get things buzzing a little bit. And it worked! It did a

lot of good.

RITCHIE: It seems that when Kennedy had Kerr on his side, he got things passed.

But when Kerr opposed him on something like Medicaid, there were some very

embarrassing defeats.

VANDER ZEE: Precisely. That was that Randolph vote I spoke to earlier that

knocked that thing down. I think that was the vote that did it.

To sum up, I don't consider my recollection to be that good about the thing beyond

what I've told you. It was a time of flux.

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A time of change, readjustment. And it was mainly that shift back to Mansfield's type of

operation, and the committee chairmen reasserting their influence and authority over their

committees and kind of following their own dictates. All of this added up to a very

muddled and unproductive period for Kennedy.

RITCHIE: Did Senator Humphrey ever express his frustration over what was

going on?

VANDER ZEE: I don't have any specific recollection that he did. So I'd have to

answer that no. Very simply, no, not to my knowledge. He was always a perpetual-

motion guy, and he always was totally preoccupied. He was a very compassionate man.

He had a sister named Fern who had all kind of problems—it wasn't his only sister—but I

have seen him in the heat of something have to go to the phone in the whip's office and

talk to Fern on the telephone just to be her brother and reassure her and calm her down.

He had a very compassionate side to him.

He tried to do it all. And in many ways, he did do it all. I've often wondered if that

frenetic, frantic life he lived in some way shortened his life. His family, I'm sure

anybody now would look in retrospect would say they suffered mightily. That Mrs.

Humphrey did a heroic job of raising her kids and all, but it's a tough go when the guy is

never there. And to me that is the great crime of politics. Somehow a national political

life and a family life just don't seem to work. It's a very rare family that can

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make it work. I can't off the cuff name any great family successes. I hope that there are

some. The people that have risen to the top whether they sought the presidency or not,

even if they've risen to the upper levels of the Congress.

RITCHIE: Was there much socializing between senators and the staff at that

stage?

VANDER ZEE: Yes. Well, yeah, there was. I would put it this way: there were

those people like in any group that are naturally attracted one to the other. There always

seemed to be some form of camaraderie in the cloakroom born of just the club-type

atmosphere, even if people were diametrically opposed politically. There were some

occasional conversations back there that were always interesting. Some would get a little

heated but never any really ill will.

I remember for the longest time the United States had this sugar import quota from

abroad, and there was some move to eliminate that. And I think we ultimately did go on

some sort of world market and eliminate in effect what was a subsidized market in the

United States by having this quota system. And Senator Fulbright was one person that

was interested in it, because I remember he said back in the cloakroom, "Where there's

sugar, there's flies, and that's all those lobbyists that are all up here feeding at the trough

on this thing." He thought they could wipe out all that stuff having those guys running

around the Hill

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pushing for their country quotas. Humphrey on the other hand, I remember he said, "Bill,

when is the last time you heard a housewife in the United States raising hell about the

price of a pound of sugar?" He said, "We have an assured supply. The whole world tries

to sell it to us. Our public gets an unlimited supply at a fair price. Nobody's

complaining. Why the hell change something that's working?"

So you'd hear that type of thing, and I'm sure their views were always seriously held

by both sides. But I think in that question ultimately the world market forces prevailed,

and then I think sugar prices skyrocketed. At least in the short term they did. I really

forget all that because I'm not a sugar user.

The thing that I do remember is that staffs were very loyal and very friendly with

their principals, their members. I remember making a speech to the people in my office

that you always have to keep uppermost in your mind when you work around this

institution that there is one name out there on that door, and it isn't yours. Nobody cares

about you, and your particular programs. You've got to get with the guy whose name is

on the door.

We had, as I recall, excellent camaraderie among the staffs, it went back and forth,

bipartisan. A gang that would go over and have a few shooters at the Carroll Arms or

wherever. It was all very good. Then I trace back to an incident that occurred—it was

after I left the Hill, it was post '64, it might have been my final days, where Senator Tom

Dodd from Connecticut and his staff—there was a serious breach of privacy, you might

say, between the senator

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and I think his AA had a girlfriend on the staff. Senator Dodd apparently disciplined to

the point of discharge. I can't remember all the details, and I can't remember the names.

But I remember that they seized a lot of the senator's records, and I think Jack Anderson

got in the act, as he'd be inclined to do.

To me, I traced what I would call the deterioration of that friendly employer-

employee trust and dedication, I trace its beginnings back to that. I don't know if I'm

right about that, but in my own experience and recollections, that's when it started to

come apart. And I only have the word, since I haven't been around the institution after

nearly thirty years, I only have the word of my contemporaries who have remained

around, that there's a great deal of acrimony and distrust and that sort of thing in the

environment here, which is indeed a sad development it it's true.

So to summarize, Don, I would say they were very good days both from the

standpoint of staff and members. After all, let's face it, we were still the big dog on the

block. I mean being that close to our worldwide victory in World War II. And

everybody thought the sky was the limit. Certainly everybody hit the ground running in

the beginning of the Kennedy administration. I trace the decline in nation's and

Democratic party's fortunes to the Johnson years, where Johnson had about a year and a

half and a second term, to two things. Of course, the Vietnam war had already been

cussed and discussed over and over, and obviously that was a part of it. But I think also

that President Johnson didn't appreciate—being from Texas perhaps, being somewhat of

a fellow

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who liked to personalize things—perhaps didn't appreciate the importance of the structure

of the Democratic Party. The grassroots. The block. The neighborhood. As I remember

lamenting during his time in office, he was doing absolutely nothing to promote it.

I don't know whether he could have sustained that type of operation in view of the

onslaught of television, which obviously had an effect. But there was nothing done in

that area. And so the Democratic party started to fall apart at the seams. At least the

party I knew, and I even see television commentators and these press pundits now sitting

around lamenting that we can't go back—that we should go back to the smoke-filled

room. That it was a better deal! As I said, earlier, when these politicos are brought up

through the system, and they have years and years of discipline and training and temper,

generally when they get to the top they're ready. And that's what we need.

In my opinion, one of our present president's problems is that despite all his years

around government, he wasn't ready for the big show. And I think that's going to make

itself apparent. I think it already is. When the heat gets on big time—despite the fact that

the war went very nicely, the Mideast war—he didn't seem to know where to go or what

to do. And that's, of course, something we can't afford. Tonight's [state of the union]

speech will be rather interesting. I hope he has more far-reaching proposals than the

repeal of luxury tax on yachts, which has been discussed as a great economic revival

measure. [laughs]

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RITCHIE: The pace of life did seem to be different to some degree at that stage.

The fact that the Senate slowed down a bit after Johnson, and Mansfield was trying to

regularize things. I get the sense from talking to people that there was certain

predictability to things, that you didn't have late-night sessions, and you could get to

night class and stuff like that.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. There wasn't the frantic do-it-yesterday type of approach.

I believe it's a historical fact—you probably know off the top of your head—that until

World War II, whether it was a law—written or unwritten—that the Congress get out by

July 4. And during the emergency condition of the war years, they departed from that.

Then it just became a habit. We always said that a lot of the members didn't want to go

back home to face the music. They would much rather be here getting lobbied, going to

cocktail parties, a more pleasant life than being back home. I think that was in fact part

of it because I don't believe anyone would argue realistically that the Congress couldn't

do its work in less time than they do if they were in session if they set their minds to it.

Others have said that the year-around Congress came about as the result of central air-

conditioning.

RITCHIE: Well, one place where people did go to relax which I've heard about

from various sources, and you've mentioned once or twice already is the Quorum Club.

Can you tell me what the Quorum Club was and how it operated in those days?

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VANDER ZEE: Well, I think I recall accurately its beginnings. The building and

the little hotel called the Carroll Arms were owned by two brothers who had been left the

property, I understand, by their father. I believe their names were Pickford. I don't recall

those Pickford boys' first names. perhaps Tom and Bill. But they had a manager named

Tom Heslop, and Tom managed the hotel. And Tom was a hail-fellow, well met. He

liked to take a little shooter or two with his friends. He knew everybody on the Hill, and

he always made sure that if Senator Dennis Chavez or anybody else liked a shooter, that

they got it. And consequently, quite a few of those folks were accommodated over there.

They had the downstairs in a semi—it wasn't a full basement—but it was a few

steps down. It was the principal lounge. And Mark Russell, who's gone on to greater

fame, was the in-house entertainer in those years. So at some point Tom, pretty much on

his own with the consent of his owners, decided it'd be nice if everything didn't have to

be in the public lounge and that they could open up a suite of rooms, and they could have

a private membership. Members could come there and have a drink, have a bite and not

be out in the full glare. Not that there was anything to hide but some people would just

prefer that.

I was reminded at lunch [laughs] over here by one of the boys that somebody

remodeled the Democratic Club over there on the other side of the Hill. Used to be the

old Rotunda restaurant. I haven't been there in years to verify this, but he said they

decided to cut a big picture window in the side of the building

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that had been a solid brick wall. And this window opened on to the bar. [laughs] Said

the first night they opened it, the place emptied out. Nobody every came back until they

put the wall back. [laughs]

It would appear that there was some of that in the motivation to have the Quorum

Club. So people were either solicited to sign up or volunteered to sign up. And I guess

Baker was one of those. I was a member over there and went over there many times and

always enjoyed it. There was never anything even bordering on anything that I ever

observed that was lewd or rude conduct. There was a cocktail waitress or two that waited

on tables, just like in any other establishment. Very convenient and nice place to go.

And then when the Baker scandal came about, well, suddenly that became a sinister

place, because that's where Baker was—who, in fact was seldom there. I don't think he

was there twice. But, suddenly, that was a den of iniquity where all of these evil deals

were being made and the legislature was being taken over by all these sinister influences

through the Quorum Club.

So the politicos—oh, not the politicos—the outsider lobbyists, for the most part,

who provided the economic, financial support for the Club by having joined and paid

dues, being the big spenders. Let's face it, a guy on Capitol Hill wasn't going to be a big-

spender on his Senate pay, or House pay, wherever he's from. But in any event, they

were frightened off. They didn't want to take the heat, so the thing just wouldn't sustain

itself. It died a natural death.

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By this time, now, I'm off the Hill. There were others involved—some eight, ten

fellows—who decided that we had liked that place. And since I was, I remember I was

one of two people appointed to a scouting expedition. For awhile we just went up—at

that time this fellow Paleologos whose been the manager of 116 for many, many years,

had a restaurant on the corner one block down from the church by the parking lot. I don't

know the street. It's on the corner of D and whatever. The club members were also

customers of his a block up the street. As I recall, full meals weren't served. There were

snacks, maybe appetizers at the old Quorum Club. So a lot of times, people would

migrate up there to his place. He finally wound up setting aside a room where people

could sit around, have drinks, and get them out of the public part of the restaurant.

So out of that, we thought that we had enjoyed what we had there. I was one of

two or three scouts that were sent out to try and locate a new site to reinstitute the club.

And we finally settled on that corner in Shott's Court, and we thought that perhaps the

fact that the Quorum Club had been the name of the Club in the old hotel that that

implied too much of a connection with the Hill and enabled the press to do these

interpretations of what took place there. So we decided to name the new place after the

number on the door. And, initially, the facility was not big enough to accommodate

really that many members at one time. So we held down the membership to a small

number.

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RITCHIE: It was a little alley house.

VANDER ZEE: Yes. It was an inverted L. It was called Shott's Alley and had

been an alley. But all of the buildings that surrounded it had been torn down to make a

parking lot, and it and one apartment house were the sole surviving buildings on that

square block. That's this block. Is the National Organization for Women still on the

corner?

RITCHIE: The National Women's Party.

VANDER ZEE: So they were on the block, and of course, they survived,

somehow, the takeover by the Senate. But, ultimately, our landlord there who was a fine

Irishman and a graduate, I think, of Georgetown. He used to have the Dean of Law

School over for lunch whose name was Paul Dean, during that time. It was a grand, old

time. He was a good landlord. It was a good facility for its time. But we ultimately had

to get bigger quarters. So when the Senate took it over for this building, these new

quarters were sought at Third and C here. So the 116 today is the successor and the

outgrowth. I saw two or three senators over there for lunch today. It's only operated now

for lunch. It's not even open in the evening as we originally were for cocktails and

sandwiches and things.

It's a very convenient place—especially to the Senate side, but I see House

members there, too—to come and meet. There are a

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number of rooms that can be reserved on request with the manager. Where you can take

a private group and just have a good, old hoedown. You've been there, so I'm sure you

are aware of how pleasant it came be for people.

There's one table that I always sit at as a single guy. It's just called a club table

where individuals by themselves just all sit down and have their bull session at noon

while they're having lunch. It's been very, very well—it's been a great success, and I

think provides a very valuable spot on Capitol Hill. And a lot of the members and staff

people alike as well as outsiders utilize it.

RITCHIE: I think Scott Peek said he was the first president of the Quorum Club

before the 116 Club.

VANDER ZEE: He probably was. Scotty very well may have been. I know at the

116 there's a plaque with the annual presidents' names on there. I was one year back, I

think, during the 70's. And a number of people. We had some repeaters. I think Lee

Williams took it more than one year. The board has always tended to be made up of—

well, I won't say exclusively—of Capitol Hill types, but maybe fellows that were at one

time, even if they're not any longer on Capitol Hill. And I think there was a tendency for

awhile not to let in new members. So consequently the membership started aging. And

this is not healthy. I was told just today they kind of reversed that policy, and they're

letting in newer and

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younger members which kind of helps the new-blood thing. You've got to have that all

the time.

RITCHIE: Apparently the original Quorum Club got its inspiration from the

administrative assistants.

VANDER ZEE: I think exclusively. Who really initiated the idea—I don't know

if it was Heslop or people on the Hill. But, in any event, it resulted in Heslop and his

principals, the Pickford boy, financing and setting aside—and they did a little interior

treatment to brighten up those two or three hotel rooms that they used for the facility. It

was just on a little walk-up. From where you walked down into the lounge, you walked

up half a flight to get up on the level where that was in the old Carroll Arms.

RITCHIE: It was a place where you could conduct business in a more relaxed

sense or just socialize.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. You know, the tradition in those days—I think it's kind of

faded away now—but the old martini lunch was de rigueur in those days, and there was

no place on the Hill proper where alcohol was served. So this was right across the street,

and gave a semblance of privacy so people having a business meeting could have a drink,

have a bite. You know, business will be done some way or another, and this was just

something that facilitated that.

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RITCHIE: Close by.

VANDER ZEE: Yep.

RITCHIE: You mentioned lobbyists as members of the group. Did you have

much dealings with lobbyists when you were working in the.majority secretary's office?

VANDER ZEE: Not really, because I wasn't in a position for anybody to lobby.

Why, what the hell! Why lobby a kind of a second- or third-rate clerk, shoe clerk, you

know, when you can lobby his boss just as well? I can't say that I didn't have a few

acquaintances from around the area who occasionally would be company people. I

remember a fellow that was a friend of mine, personal friend of mine, he represented

Sperry and Hutchison, the green stamp people. His name was Joe Oros. And through

Joe I met his principal one time. I think I met him way after I left the Hill.

Of course, as you know, the mainstay of the Sperry and Hutchison Company

business was the so-called trading stamps, or green stamps. They'd become a big thing

around the country, and someone put in a bill to eliminate trading stamps in the District

of Columbia. So, as this is still typical, anytime something like that happened, these

people see their national business threatened—especially in the District of Columbia it

would be a terrible precedent. It was known widely that Senator Humphrey was a great

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supporter of small business and that he himself had been a small-town pharmacist and

druggist. And that these trading stamps were a weapon of the huge chains that used these

type of devices to drive these small businesses out. So there was great hope that Senator

Humphrey would take up the cause of these anti-stamp people and help to carry that bill

and in this way eventually erode the business nationally. I talked to him about it at some

length, and he had already reached the conclusion that there wasn't a damned thing he,

Hubert Humphrey, could do about trading stamps, that they were already here to stay.

They had gotten too big, and everybody liked them. Whether they really were free or not

was very questionable, but he wasn't going to take a position on it.

So you'd get those kind of contacts. But no big deals. I told you the one earlier

about the fellow who had been a subcontractor to Boeing in Montana and wanted to do

that some more. But, hell, those kind of decisions don't get made by clerks in the Senate.

RITCHIE: Well, you mentioned that Baker at that stage was getting more and

more involved in outside activities and his business arrangements. Was that common, or

was he unusual in that?

VANDER ZEE: I really don't know how common. It was not uncommon. My

recollection is there were absolutely no rules—written or unwritten—governing that in

that period. My reflection would be that he had simply become more high profile and

open about

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it and it was known. He made no attempt to hide it. He had a partner that had built this

motel in Ocean City. Then there was the other thing about the vending machines which, I

think, did obviously—maybe Baker wouldn't have been involved in that if he hadn't been

in the position he held. But, he could have been. This was something, I think, they put

these vending machines as well as in some places in the local area they put them out in a

defense contracting plant in California, as I recall.

That was widely interpreted as smacking of a big fix and something improper. I

guess as a result of Baker's experience that a lot of that changed. I think now, from what

I hear, Senate employees in general, maybe in particular, and government employees in

general are literally foreclosed from outside activities. I don't think they're prevented

from buying and selling real estate. Maybe they would be speculatively. I don't really

know. Or is there some kind of disclosure that has to be filed?

RITCHIE: Oh, yes. It depends on your level on the staff, but their are certain

forms you file with the Ethics Committee, this, that, and whatever. There certainly are a

lot more rules and regulations than there were before.

VANDER ZEE: Right. Right. And my understanding is that up to that time there

was absolutely no guidance on that. So really a person could do what the hell ever he

wanted to do, and probably if Baker was guilty of mistakes in judgment there it was that

he

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didn't make any attempt to conceal it. He was perfectly open about it.

In fact, I was among a couple or three hundred other guests invited to the opening

of the motel as was Vice President Johnson and, God, half the Senate. I really don't

remember who all was there, but it was a big party. Nobody was complaining then. But,

of course, later on it began.

RITCHIE: Did it ever strike you that he was spending more time on his outside

activities than on the Senate business?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. I think that two things happened. I think that Senator

Mansfield's style of leadership automatically freed him up. And I was there, he trusted

me, and we never had any trouble that I'm aware of, and Joe, too, because he and Joe had

known each other much longer than I had known either one of them. I don't think they

had been fellow pages, but Joe had come up somewhere after Baker.

What the hell! He kind of got freed up. I think he still had the position as treasurer

for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, because part of the money problem was

with those S & L contributions that came in during that period. So he was out running.

He was either in the office doing things, which were Senate-related or otherwise, or he

was out traveling, too.

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RITCHIE: I wonder why he didn't leave when Johnson left, to just go into

business.

VANDER ZEE: I feel sure that in retrospect he would ask that same thing, or tell

you that he should have made that judgment about that same time, and become a private

citizen rather than continuing to have the accusation, just or unjust, that he was guilty of

these conflicts of interest.

But I think that in the final analysis if you are on a government payroll, I think the

public consensus has always been that you settle for that. And that's it, you know. You

can do limited, private things; but you can't be out doing major undertakings because it

just constitutes a time conflict if no other one. That would be my guess on that.

RITCHIE: Baker was still involved with the Democratic Campaign Committee as

you mentioned in fund-raising.

VANDER ZEE: I feel that.

RITCHIE: Did you get involved at all in that end of it?

VANDER ZEE: No. I had no role nor was privy to anything or had any function

there.

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RITCHIE: That was another thing that was much wider. There weren't as many

restrictions. There certainly wasn't as much filing necessary.

VANDER ZEE: Right. This was still before the wrapped themselves in the red

tape. Yeah, it was pretty much whatever anybody wanted to contribute. They were there

to receive the funds. The more the merrier.

RITCHIE: And it left it to the staff, to their discretion as to what was legitimate

and what wasn't, and to the members.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmmm. Well, whoever—I forget who chaired the campaign

committee during those times. It might have been George Smathers.

RITCHIE: Smathers was one of the early on—in the '56 or '58 election was the

chairman.

VANDER ZEE: Some time, yeah. So, to the best of my knowledge, during the

time Baker held that position he was there at the, I suppose, at the convenience of

whoever was chairman of that thing.

RITCHIE: What was your impression of Senator Smathers, by the way?

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VANDER ZEE: He was a very personable guy. I knew Scotty Peek much better

than I knew Smathers, of course. If they had a little social function over at the office, I'd

get invited over. I'd go by and say hi and have a drink. I knew a fellow named Bud

Lucky pretty well that worked for George Smathers. Bud was one of our campaigners in

'60 as was Scotty. Everybody kind of turned to there in the presidential year. They were

a good bunch. Everybody enjoyed them. I last visited with Scotty, maybe we were here

in Washington, but I've been to his home in Florida. We're not close friends, but I've

been to see him in Florida. And I feel if he came to Texas, he'd give me a call.

RITCHIE: Smathers was secretary of the Democratic Conference.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmmm.

RITCHIE: Kept his hand in the leadership of the party, I guess much more so than

any of the other senators.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmmm.

RITCHIE: Were there other senators that you sort of relied on or looked to more

than others at that time?

VANDER ZEE: In what way?

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RITCHIE: Well, with the Democratic majority secretary's office, were there

senators who aspired to leadership or that you would deal with more frequently than

others?

VANDER ZEE: Well, there was that Class of '58? I suppose that when the

Democrats picked up quite a significant number of seats that included Muskie, Gale

McGee,

RITCHIE: [Eugene] McCarthy

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. And Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin. Maybe [Quentin]

Burdick, although he followed his father. He might have come in a special election. But

there was—I think Senator [Robert C.] Byrd was in it. [Daniel] Inouye didn't come in

until '61 or

RITCHIE: '62

VANDER ZEE: Maybe it was because of their relative newness, they wanted to

consult more and know what's going on and be told. The old timers, Senator Lister Hill

used to. Senator Russell never did. Once in awhile he would walk by back in the

cloakroom, he'd say, "What's goin' on?"

But the younger members would come around and actively want you to tell them

what was taking place. This, that, and the other. I just want to mention one thing about

Senator Russell before I forget it. I was just standing back in the cloakroom with him one

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day, and he was a smoker. He was back there having a cigarette. We were looking out

the doors to the floor.

He said, "You know, I had somebody on my staff look it up the other day, and since

I've been here," now this would have been in the early sixties, "since I've been here over

five hundred members have come and gone from this body." That's a five hundred per

cent turnover. And I think he might have been in his fourth or fifth term then. I think he

did a full term after that. Do you remember when he left?

RITCHIE: He came in '33 and died in '71.

VANDER ZEE: Okay. So he lived another ten years after the time I'm talking

about, and he died in office, right? So those little reflections are kind of interesting. Put

a perspective on things. Because it's absolutely astounding when you look back, these

interim appointments. You know, I think it's still true that no self-appointed member has

ever survived the next election.

RITCHIE: Governors who have themselves appointed find it's the kiss of death.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. There was a guy from South Dakota named [Joseph]

Bottom that did it during my time. I think Howard Edmondson from Oklahoma. Any

number! Nobody has ever survived

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that curse. So, we don't see too many self-appointments any more. I doubt that they

want to try to buck the curse there.

RITCHIE: Even the senator who was appointed to succeed Richard Russell was

defeated in the primary.

VANDER ZEE: Right. And there have been so many of those seat-warmers.

There were more of them than we remember because they're here so briefly. You take

the guy named Smith who took Kennedy's seat.

RITCHIE: Benjamin Smith.

VANDER ZEE: Ben Smith. Lovely guy. Sweet guy. Some friend of President

Kennedy.

RITCHIE: His college roommate.

VANDER ZEE: That they put in for a seat warmer. Problem was he got to liking

the place! The guy really took it hard when he left. He shed tears. I remember that. He

hated like hell to go. But he was here, what? Barely a year. So you see a lot of that.

Those numbers are much greater than we would expect. People that come and go from

the Senate as members.

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RITCHIE: Were there any senators that gave you any trouble? The independent

kind.

VANDER ZEE: Not really. The majority of them were great gentlemen. There

was a senator from Ohio named Steve Young that was inclined to be high strung. I

always figured maybe he had some kind of—maybe not neuro—but maybe a glandular

situation. He one time came into the chamber and something had made him unhappy. I

don't even know what it was. I don't know if I knew at the time. But I was, you know,

a shoe clerk over there in the corner at the desk and convenient. There was a full

chamber that day on some kind of an important vote. And he chose that time to come

over and dress me down on behalf of the staff. It was kind of embarrassing because he

was being loud and noisy. But he cooled down and went away. I just said, "Yes, sir,

senator, we'll try to take care of whatever your problem is, and we'll get at it." You

know—the only thing you can do.

Some while later that day, after whatever vote was taken Quentin Burdick and, I

think, Gaylord Nelson both walked over and said, "Van"—everybody called me Van.

They said, "Van, we're sorry that a member would do that. And we just want to

apologize." I thought that was kind of unusual.

But he'd get a little goofy. I knew his AA. A boy named Miller. God, the stories

he could tell! [laughs] But he was just one of those characters that come along from time

to time.

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RITCHIE: He was famous for writing insulting letters to his constituents.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Miller told me about some time some guy came in the

office, and the Senator didn't want him there. So he had a couple of guards come take the

guy away. And after they were on each side of him, Young runs over and belts him in

the back! [laughs]

So those are amusing little asides that happen around a place like this. But, by and

large, members were all very, very courteous gentlemen. They had bigger things to do.

One of the impressions I had—this is more from my page boys than anyone else—is that

the great humanitarian members, the great "would-be" humanitarian members, the great

civil righters, the great this rights, and that rights, and the other rights—when it came to

the treatment of staff people they were absolutely the worst!

[Jacob] Javits. Maybe [Abraham] Ribicoff. Imperious. Treating the little kids like,

you know, publicly upbraiding them and all that sort of nonsense. But never the so-

called backward people from the South. They were always very genteel. And very kind

to everybody. By and large they are a fine group of men.

I only knew a few of them in the context of their home surroundings, of course,

because we dealt with them here. One that I did a little bit was Senator Bob Byrd,

because when I was in West Virginia in '60 he came over when I was there for

Humphrey. He came over and spent a night or two with me in my hotel room in

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the Daniel Boone there in Charleston. Senator Byrd's a great one not to run up hotel bills

in his home state. He'd stay with people in their houses. As we know, he was very close

to his people. He knows how to get with his troops, and his career reflects it.

I haven't spent any great amount of time in West Virginia in recent years, but I feel

sure he'd be a shoo-in as long as he can get up there and saw that fiddle—make the effort.

RITCHIE: I think when he gets less than 80 percent people are surprised.

VANDER ZEE: Yes. See Humphrey had been seat-mate with Matt Neeley, one

of his predecessors. I don't know whether it was Randolph or Byrd who succeeded

Neeley. It might have been [Chapman] Revercomb. There were a couple of other

fellows in there briefly from West Virginia.

But Humphrey had great regard for Neeley. Thought he was a fine man. I felt the

kinship with the West Virginia people, because they're my working stiffs that I told you

about earlier. They're a lot like our original Texans. They're close to the earth. Tend to

be religious. Tend to be hardworking. Tend to be independent. And tend to be poor.

And the West Virginia people were damn sure all of those. They have been in my

opinion victimized for many, many years by eastern financial interests, particularly in

mining, coal mining, gas, railroads, all of those things. It's improved somewhat. But in

the 60's, if you went into

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southern West Virginia it looked like a moonscape. The gashes in the hills. The ink in

the streams. Terrible. I've never seen a piece of land raped like that place. And, of

course, the people had been raped at the same time.

So I admired their spirit that they were able to maintain. And West Virginians had

more of their native sons killed in World War II than other state in the Union. I always

thought that was an interesting statistic. Here are these so-called backward, ignorant,

underprivileged, uneducated hillbillies—as if that's why they lost more of their sons in

World War II than other, it wasn't that, it was because of their love for their country. And

I always thought that they are a lot like the Tennesseans—the Tennesseans, of course,

were largely responsible for the establishment of early Texas. They're given credit for

being the guys that put the glue in the gang at the Alamo.

I tell my Tennessee friends, if there hadn't been a back door at the Alamo, there

wouldn't be a Tennessee today. [laughs] They're similar-type people, and I appreciate

those people. And you'll pardon me as a native of New York, Don, for saying this, but

I've never been able to identify with the eastern—who was it, was it no less a personage

than Nixon's vice president who talked about the effete..?

RITCHIE: Oh, [Spiro] Agnew.

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VANDER ZEE: I forget what the phraseology. I think Pat Buchanan put it

together for him.

RITCHIE: "Effete snobs."

VANDER ZEE: That plus.

RITCHIE: "Nattering nabobs of negativism."

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. He stitched together some of that deathless prose. I'm one

of those guys who definitely feels that the heart and soul of the Democratic Party—and

this is where we fail—should be the lunch-bucket guy. Keep him going. Keep him

working. Give him his wherewithal. Let him improve his family life. Let him improve

his lot in life. Let him get his kids educated. And if we had kept that up, I don't think we

would have been the failure that a lot of people brand our party today. But we didn't.

RITCHIE: You brought up Senator Byrd. I remember when I first came to

Washington, I was a student and I used to sit in the galleries and watch what was going

on. This was in the mid-sixties, I guess, and I used to see Senator Byrd on the floor all

the time. This was before he was whip or party leader or anything like that. Were there

some senators who spent more time on the floor and in the cloakroom than others?

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VANDER ZEE: Um-hmm. You probably picked the classic example. I think that

Senator Byrd, he's a guy that came up from Crab Orchard, West Virginia where people

that I knew in West Virginia told me he worked in a butcher shop. People that know him,

and know him well. People that claimed to have contributed to his first campaign.

People out of Beckley—one being the father of Nickie Joe Rahall here in the House.

This is a guy who aspired to bigger and better things. I think at some point in his

life he just willed that by sheer determination and principally education he was going to

do it. So I think unlike many, he made a special study, and you recall, he literally set a

trap for Ted Kennedy when Kennedy thought he had a walk-in, Byrd took it right away.

Snatched it right away—the, assistant leadership, and subsequently the top job. So this is

the kind of guy, you want to watch him, when you go up against him. You know the

easy, easy bad assumption that Kennedy made was this guy from West Virginia is going

to be a pushover. No contest. Well, guys like that are always a contest.

So I assume that all that time he was spending was prepping himself to make that

effort. While you were watching, he was probably doing that. He hadn't started that

when I worked. But, in the House! He was over there when I was over there, or he had

just left. He had a reputation, which was for holding prayer meetings in the office. I

remember hearing some guys talking about that. Before they started the day, they had to

start out with a prayer meeting.

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Well, like I say, this is all part of a pattern. I've seen it in my life, you've probably

have, too. These fellows have their beliefs; their agenda. They're willing to make almost

any sacrifice and abide almost any amount of time. I'm told by my friends of the

senator's who are also friends of mine—West Virginians. In fact, one of them was Matt

Neeley's AA, guy named Harold Miller here in Washington. I assume Harold's still

kicking around here—that Byrd would, after a full day's work, would go in the office and

spend half the night phoning and talking to key people in West Virginia. He did that.

Maybe he's still doing it! This is certainly not that thing that Senator Fulbright, among

others, I think, got accused of. And that was forgetting how they got here, and not

keeping the home fires banked, and keeping in constant touch. They got a little too

remote, and then the folks back home, when push came to shove. . . Well, I don't think

Byrd would be caught in that situation. That's my estimate, and I would assume when

you saw him on the floor all the time that was exactly what he was doing. I forget the

year that he went to the whip job.

RITCHIE: It wasn't until '71. He was Democratic Conference Secretary in the

sixties. But he seemed to like to be down there on the floor. I guess he was collecting

IOUs from the senators for favors he could do for them if he was on the floor all the time.

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VANDER ZEE: Probably that, and probably watching the parliamentary stuff.

I'm sure he mastered that procedural manual a long time ago.

RITCHIE: Were there some senators who just liked to come and sit on the

couches in the cloakroom?

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmm. Yeah. You had senators, they were fine senators, but

they were on in years. Pat McNamara from Michigan. He more or less just came to the

floor and cast his vote and stayed back in the cloakroom most of the time. I don't recall

that there was any group or any individuals who devoted themselves to the floor.

We always had a hell of a time getting these junior members. They were always

trying to get out of sitting in the chair. So it was more or less being there when you were

presenting something, or when there was floor action or votes. That sort of thing.

RITCHIE: The atmosphere of the cloakroom was one that I don't have a great

sense of. I've walked through it, but only when the Senate is not in session. I don't have

a great sense of what it's like to be in there on a daily basis.

VANDER ZEE: Well, the main activity there is the boys who answer the phones

and tell the senators they have their calls. There used to be, I haven't been there in years

myself, but there

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used to be booths on both sides of one wing where they could take their phone calls and

make their phone calls. The boys handled them for them there. There were the

custodians, three or four boys who kept the men's room. They'd replenish the cool boxes

with the waters from around the country. Some was from Arkansas. Some was from

West Virginia. The spring waters. It was just a place where they could go ahead and

keep on with their personal activities because they had access to the telephone and still be

there and, of course, as I said, sometimes, there were pretty good bull sessions that went

on back there.

The day President Kennedy was shot, when it started coming over the teletype,

there was a pretty good-sized group repaired back there—just to sit and monitor the

news. We didn't have any television sets in there that I can recall. But there may have

been. I don't remember that part.

RITCHIE: Were you in the chamber when the news came in?

VANDER ZEE: Yes. I was at the old duty station there at the corner desk. The

way I learned of it, each day—I think I may have told you this early on yesterday—but

each day we would have one of the boys assigned, it would be his day to pull the ticker

tapes. When it got down to the floor, they would tear them off and hang them on the

board so the members could always go in there and look at their news tapes. And the

little page that was on duty that day came over to my desk in the corner, and said "Mr.

Vander Zee,

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there's something on the ticker tape about the President being shot."

Teddy Kennedy was in the presiding officer's chair. So I told him to get Senator

Kennedy relief. Go request one of the other junior members to relieve him. And I either

told him, I think I went over myself and told Senator Mansfield there was something

coming on the tape. And he walked out. I walked with him, I recall, because I remember

what he said. As usual, he had his pipe. He took his pipe out of his pocket as we walked

out. I don't recall he was smoking on the floor, but he'd smoke out in the lobby. And he

read it. And the lead was by a guy named Jack Bell who was in our gallery. He was

either AP or UPI. I don't know which.

RITCHIE: AP.

VANDER ZEE: So Jack was in a phone booth down there and with the lead in the

deal about the shots from the grassy ridge or bridge. It was all very vague and indefinite.

But Mansfield said, "I wonder what's wrong with those people down there?" In Dallas.

And, of course, he was alluding to the fact that both Adlai Stevenson and Mr. and Mrs.

Johnson had been jostled about and spat upon. I think Lady Bird might have gotten hit

with signs by unappreciative groups in that area, in just the few preceding months. So his

off-the-cuff reaction was that it was a bunch of crazies in Dallas that had done it again.

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And, of course, it was, I guess an hour. Two hours? Anyway, whatever the time

factor was before it was known that he was dead. There were tears shed there that day in

the cloakroom by members—staff alike. Because that's very jarring—even if you weren't

close to the man. To have known him, and to know as the president of the country you

could be shot dead in a motorcade in Dallas. I don't think I had, even as a young man,

had a full appreciation of the impact of that—especially on older men, more aware of

their mortality, more aware of, perhaps, the political shock and consequences, like that. I

forget, was it our fourth assassination of a president? You had Lincoln, McKinley,

Garfield?

RITCHIE: Yes.

VANDER ZEE: Then Kennedy. Well, not in that order. It was, of course, a great

tragedy well recognized whether you were a Kennedy fan or not. I don't know. Again,

my personal belief is you have to go through all of these procedures the Secret Service

goes through to protect the president. But if a determined assassin wants to kill a

president, I don't think there was a way ever devised to keep him from it. We just have to

hope that not too many are motivated that way.

But crazies are crazies—whatever makes them, wherever they come from. That's

who you've got to stop. Irrational people. I don't think that any of our presidents have

ever been assassinated

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by somebody who would be considered rational in the ordinary sense of the word.

This movie that's out [JFK] now if nothing else, it will sharpen the consciousness of

the public, I think. Show them once again that it can happen. As I see it, that's the value.

I'm sure it doesn't hurt the Secret Service's assignment a bit or their appropriation

[laughs] to have that going on. It's sad in a way.

My understanding is that less than one hundred years ago, Don, that American

citizens could come to Washington, walk into the White House, and talk to their president

without an appointment! Less than a hundred years ago! It's an amazing thing to realize

that in this period of time has developed this remoteness that the president has from the

people. And I can't help but think that a lot of that—George Reedy wrote the book. I

think he called it the Imperial Presidency?

RITCHIE: The Reedy book was the Twilight of the Presidency. Arthur

Schlesinger wrote the book the Imperial Presidency .

VANDER ZEE: Okay. And I read Reedy's. I didn't read Schlesinger's, but wasn't

their theme more or less this removal of the president from the people some way, this

isolation, which permits them—staff people—to manipulate, ill serve, misinform—

whatever you want to call it? These things happen in that kind of an environment where

maybe it couldn't otherwise where a man is truly not in touch with common folk.

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RITCHIE: Did you notice a change in atmosphere in the Senate after Johnson

became president? After the assassination? Was the assassination a real shock? Did it

get things moving again?

VANDER ZEE: There was so damn much that was going on there. I don't have

too much personal recollection. Let's face it—Johnson was back in the White House the

next day, was he not? And then there was the funeral in which again the Capitol was the

site of it.

All I remember was everybody kind of wanting to get in the boat then and get on

with it. All of this was a great help to Johnson.

RITCHIE: Did you stay through the passage of the civil rights bill in '64? June of

'64?

VANDER ZEE: No. No, I departed, at the end of February I had some medical

leave and I had to get a light surgery. I think I went and got that and was out of here

before the end of March, that's my recollection. So I wasn't around when it actually got

passed. But it was apparent even before—I guess, January-February period—that there

was going to be a lot more activity—and in all likelihood, productive activity because if it

couldn't be done then with that set-up, it wasn't going to be done. And everybody was

frustrated to hell with the way it had been up to then in the Kennedy Administration.

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I think the common expression was: Kennedy couldn't buy a bill out of Congress.

RITCHIE: How about the White House liaison people?. Did you deal with them

very much?

VANDER ZEE: Well, when Larry [O'Brien] had it. Early on. Some in

connection with substantive stuff on the floor, but not a hell of a lot. One of the principal

things we had that Humphrey and I met with Larry about was we had reason to believe

that Larry and Ken O'Donnell were blocking, simply because of personal dislike coming

out of the West Virginia campaign, that they were blocking a nomination. I don't think it

was a nomination; it was a Schedule C of one of the people who'd been Humphrey

loyalist. We talked to Larry, and Humphrey—much to my surprise—kind of gave him an

old Dutch uncle talk, and "Larry, you know, you've got to realize if you want to get

things done up here we would like for you to do some things for us." Most unlike

Humphrey.

And Larry got it done. And the guy got his appointment. I think it was an

appointment down at Commerce, and everything worked out all right. But that's about it.

I remember during my year with Humphrey there we had nice visits from Dean Rusk,

usually in the evening after work. Folks would come by to chat, to talk business. I

wasn't always in the room. Sometimes Humphrey would invite me. Sometimes I'd whip

up a drink. We had a little fridge up there in one of those deals Joe Duke put in [laughs]

so we could offer a

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little hospitality. I remember good chat. Joe Clark from Pennsylvania. Any number of

folks, you knew would come by and spend a little time in the evening. Have a snort, talk

things over. Sometimes administration officials. Sometimes Senate members.

RITCHIE: But the Kennedy problem wasn't a problem of liaison, was it?

VANDER ZEE: Well, I don't think so. As I recall, Larry was well liked. He was

the only one that I can remember as having carried that freight. During my time there

may have been others, I just don't remember that.

RITCHIE: Mike Manatos also.

VANDER ZEE: Oh Mike was down there. He was working for Larry, wasn't he?

RITCHIE: He spent lot of time in the Senate.

VANDER ZEE: Uh-huh. I knew Mike quite well. He was a grand guy. Yes, he

was around saying hi. See your recollection, Don, because of your position—I trust—is

quite, a lot more acute than mine. But Mike was well liked. He'd worked for [Joseph]

O'Mahoney up here, I believe, and knew the area. And I suppose Mike had been

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a Kennedy ally out in Wyoming. That's the reason he was in that job.

But, basically, I would characterize it as a time of cooperation and everybody going

in the same direction, or trying to! And I think, as I said, it was the last time it was that

way. In the Democratic Party. The conflict and the unsettled nature of things began in

that Vietnam period, and it's never been the same.

RITCHIE: What was it that made you decide to leave in '64?

VANDER ZEE: Well, as I said, I had been pursuing that law degree, and it was

always my intention, my plan, the aim was to be able to liberate myself from employers

and pursue my own goals and objectives. And I did that for twenty-eight years, up to

now. The Texas scene has been extremely difficult from an economic standpoint in the

last few years. We started having our major problems in '84. We didn't quite know what

was happening to us when the oil price collapse came. But in '85 came the collapse in

real estate values which followed immediately behind it. Next was the banks and S&Ls.

Then it's been one form or another since then of the economic grinder. We're going into

our eighth year of depression down there.

So it was strictly that. And I went downtown originally—I mentioned earlier the

congressman from Missouri named Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had lost his reelection

bid to a Republican MD from the Springfield area, for the simple reason that what

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should have been his own campaign time, he had spent for Stuart Symington. So he lost

his seat in either 1960. In any event, we were friends. We kept in touch, and so when I

discussed with him that I was going to be leaving the Hill, he told me he would like very

for me to join him. He was not an attorney, but he said "I have a great deal of business

that I'm turning away. and you could handle that if you want to come into the office with

me." I wound up doing that. Charlie made me a guarantee to start with him and an

incentive program. We got started that way. Then, after a few years, he decided to leave

the Washington area; and I went ahead. I officed with both him and another former

House member named Slick Rutherford from Texas who, I think, also lost his seat in

1960.

And with Harold Miller, the gentleman I mentioned to you who'd been Matthew

Neeley's AA. We all had our little client list, and we just went about carrying our bucket

around town like many of the guys make their living here.

RITCHIE: You did some lobbying here on the Hill?

VANDER ZEE: I did. I also did agency work. Hill work, to some extent. I guess

I found my most important and interesting and slightly remunerative effort was in behalf

of a national chain of agricultural cooperatives in Spain that wanted to take advantage of

some of our PL 480 credit transactions. So at that time I was able to put together the

biggest Title IV, which is a private sale for credit, but for cash money—a corn deal into

Spain. We put in

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about three-quarters of a million tons worth around $40 or $50 million guaranteed by the

Spanish government. The contract never did go through to full fruition because

Spaniards don't know how to handle success. When success is looming on the horizon,

they start scrapping among themselves. I think this is typical of some national groups

and certainly is of them. And Mr. Franco was still the boss at that time and got tired of

the whole damned thing and just canceled the deal. Paid the US government off, and that

was that. But I think they drew down some $l0 or $l5 million before that happened.

RITCHIE: What was it like to come back to Capitol Hill as a lobbyist having

worked here as a staff person?

VANDER ZEE: I never liked the feeling. I never enjoyed it. I always felt like I

was a hat-in-the-hand guy trying to take advantage of personal friendships. Not that my

clients' business wasn't meritorious—I always tried to have meritorious things to present.

RITCHIE: Did you have certain senators that you would see more regularly than

others, or did it just depend on what the issue was?

VANDER ZEE: Yeah, it would depend more on who you were representing and

where the work had to be done. As I recall, I

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wound up having as much work on the House side as I did over here. Perhaps you were

trying to get a little old piece of language in a bill for people you were working for—

something they needed or wanted in a piece of legislation. More than not, I would have

to characterize my retainers simply as access. I mean, I was retained because people

perceived that I had access, and I recall being retained a time or two by interests who I

don't recall ever asked me to do a damned thing, specifically. They simply wanted to

have me around, I suppose, in case they thought they needed intercession with a

particular member. Somebody, you know, the most obvious being Humphrey because

he'd been my most prominent and immediate principal up here.

I'm trying to think back, I remember one time being retained by a firm that had a

plant—a big installation—out here in suburban Virginia called Melpar. They were a

defense contractor. And I never did lobby anybody in the Defense Department. That's

one of the company's I'm speaking of. They used to have a membership in a private club

in Pennsylvania called the Rolling Rock Club. I think it was something that the Mellons

had started over there years back. Pretty exclusive thing, I'm led to understand.

I'd been over there a time or two, and then on one occasion they asked me if I

would invite Vice President Humphrey. You know, to do a little trout fishing or play a

little golf. In the winter time they had shooting, they had pheasants. And it was indeed a

lovely place.

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So he was to come over. But after I got over there, I learned for the first time that

no blacks were permitted at the Rolling Rock Club. I conveyed that to the V.P. I had to

do that because he had a Secret Service agent on his staff who was a black man. May

have been others, but I knew there was one. And, as a consequence, he didn't come over.

He didn't want to have that kind of a matter come up, obviously. What the hell, with his

background and record. So we had to cancel out that little social engagement. [laughs]

I worked with George Bushman who had been an AA to Homer Capehart from

Indiana. George, after he left the Hill, was working downtown. And somehow he got

involved in Senator Dirksen's one-man, one-vote effort. And I remember working some

on that with George. I don't remember the full nature of that legislation. I guess some

people would say it was designed to deprive certain people.

RITCHIE: He wanted to overturn the Supreme Court ruling at that time, basically

so that rural districts wouldn't lose so much representation.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmm. But I remember working in favor of that. I don't

remember why, unless George asked me. I don't remember being paid by anybody to do

it. And, as I say, I got off into this kind of a specialty area of these public law 480 deals.

And after I made at that time the biggest ever made into Spain, I got

136

several—none of them materialized—but I had a lot of work to do there and try to make

other ones happen, too. Aristotle Onassis sent me to Greece to look into the possibility of

doing one over there, which didn't work. There were others. Other countries. I

represented people in Central America. In fact, one was a displaced Cuban. He'd been

run out of Cuba at the time of the Castro takeover, and he'd gone to Guatemala and had a

cattle processing operation down there and was exporting what they called boxed red lean

meat to the United States. They'd bone it out, ship it frozen in forty-pound boxes, I

recall.

The Central Americans all had a quota, and their desire was to cooperate one with

the other and get their quota upped. So I took on that effort for awhile. There were

constant things like that which paid the rent. I wound up traveling half the year, meeting

with these clients or pursuing their objectives overseas. Very enjoyable at that time in

my life. I wound up wearying of the travel and ultimately decided in 1970, after seven

years of private practice here, to go back to Texas.

RITCHIE: Before you went back, did you get involved in the '64 campaign; or the

'68 campaign?

VANDER ZEE: Now in '64 we had the convention in Atlantic City. I was at that

convention. I believe my involvement that year, it wasn't going to be a contest—or we

didn't think. Well, certainly not for the nomination! So the convention was just a

137

formality. And as I recall, Joe Duke put me to work just on helping him on convention

security.

Oh, I remember now. He asked me to man the platform, and he said "The problem

with the Secret Service is they don't know who the hell the pols are around the country."

And he said, "You do, so I want you on that platform and you decide who makes the trip

down to the podium." And I did that little chore. There again, another housekeeping

chore.

In '68 I was in Chicago. I was active. What are we talking about now? Was that

the Chicago convention?

RITCHIE: Yeah.

VANDER ZEE: Where Humphrey was nominated?

RITCHIE: Right.

VANDER ZEE: Well, I was still here in town, so I was active in that. I was back

out in the states where I had worked before. West Virginia. Probably in the West. I

guess I was back to Montana. I don't off hand recall, there may have been others.

I remember spending most of my time at the convention in Chicago with the

Montana folks because we had them in pretty good shape. The job was just to make sure

it stayed in good shape. You know, that's typical of a convention deal when you have an

138

assignment. So I tried to have little receptions, keep them entertained.

You know, it's kind of like a flock of quail. You just make sure they keep going in

the right direction and nobody wanders off the range. So I did that. In the actual

campaign and election process, I'm sure I was out there as an advance guy. But I don't

recall. Yeah, I had to be, because we got the call again. Oh, no. We'd had the call

before. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yeah. Okay. We were back out there as advance

guys, but I didn't attend the '72 convention or any convention thereafter. '68 was my last

one.

RITCHIE: In '68 you said that before Johnson withdrew from the race, you got a

call to give him some assistance. What was the story about that?

VANDER ZEE: Well, Democratic Headquarters, as you know, was in the

Watergate building. This fellow who was from Oklahoma, he'd been—why can't I

remember his name? My secretary in my private law office had been Howard

Edmondson's secretary. She'd been with him as governor and senator; and when he was

defeated, I don't know how but I wound up hiring her. Little girl from Weatherford,

Oklahoma named Edna Shiff. And Edna turned out to be a wonderful secretary. She just

could take care of everything—especially when I had to be out of the country. She could

keep the clients happy. Took care of all the mail. You know, a girl who hadn't had her

139

background wouldn't be able to do that. But she did it beautifully.

RITCHIE: You had gotten a call to come help out while Johnson was still in the

race?

VANDER ZEE: Okay. Okay. The fellow that called me was the guy running the

national committee for Johnson. God, I ought to remember his name because he had

been Howard Edmondson's AA. I just got it: John Criswell.

He said, "Rein, I got a few names here of guys we'd like to go to work." Now, see,

I'm in private practice downtown on DeSales Street, as I recall. And he said, "Would you

come down here and visit?" So I did, I had a brief meeting with John. He said, "A

fellow has come up from Texas to coordinate this effort," a lawyer from Corpus Christi,

and an old Johnson friend. I hadn't seen him in the '60 election. Cecil Burney. He said,

"I'd like you to go meet Cecil and visit with him." So out of those two conversations

came the request to get my rear out to Wisconsin which was coming up after New

Hampshire.

I asked for a few days reprieve so I could get my personal affairs where I could take

off. During that time the New Hampshire returns came in, and it was all over. I always

refer to it as a campaign that never was, because subsequent to that Johnson's public

announcement that was he and Lady Bird and decided roughly a year earlier that he

wouldn't run again.

140

I don't know who all was involved. There were probably at least ten, fifteen, maybe

twenty guys at that point. Just guys they could count on for that sort of thing. I'm sure

my name was put there by Jim Rowe. Jim was always buzzing around there. Getting

things organized. He told me when he put me into that job in the '60 campaign, he said,

"I did this for Adlai Stevenson" in '52 or '56, whichever one. And he said, "Vander Zee,

you're young, you've got the energy. There's only one thing I'll guarantee you. You'll

never do it again." [laughs]

And he was basically right. That led up to that story I told you about Johnson

pulling out on the Hawaii trip which threw my whole role into limbo anyway other than

as an advance man.

RITCHIE: But in '68 you think Johnson pulled out because he didn't want to lose?

VANDER ZEE: That would still be my assessment after these years. He just

hated the prospect of having a loser. To the point, I think, that rather than go into the

prospect of a loser, he didn't even want a close one. He'd had that, on that Texas election

with Stevenson—Coke Stevenson. And I think that he just couldn't stomach that

possibility. And he thought well, with the war thing, if it's that bad, if Gene McCarthy

can get that damn many votes, I better get out. And be recorded, historically, as a guy

that just left the office voluntarily.

141

RITCHIE: Living in Washington and following politics, what was your

assessment of Johnson as president. Were you pleased with what he was doing or

surprised?

VANDER ZEE: I've got to be honest with you, Don. I didn't have that much

contact with the Johnson White House. I was invited down there a time or two. I

remember going down there I guess it was the Christmas right after Kennedy was killed.

Now, as a Texan I had been known to Johnson as a Texan, though I never worked

directly for him. He always invited me to functions out at his house when he was a V.P.

I say always—certainly to Texas club events. And one I remember—I guess it had to be

'61 or '62—I remember the two honorees that evening were Henry Gonzales and a fellow

named Graham Purcell from Wichita Falls who came into the House. There was a

reception in that house Johnson had bought from the little steel lady . . .

RITCHIE: Perle Mesta.

VANDER ZEE: Yeah. Mrs. Mesta. So he was always very cordial and kind to

me. I saw him on a plane, I went with him—at my request—again, this had to be 1961,

when I had been working Humphrey's personal politics. And I asked Walter [Jenkins]—I

knew that Johnson was going out as the vice president to address the governors'

conference in Honolulu. And I had been in the Navy out there, and I had attended prior

governors' conferences at the

142

Glacier National Park, at places, and knew a good bit of those people and their staffs.

This seemed to be a proper function for me in my capacity of looking out for Humphrey's

national interest.

So I asked if I could hook a ride out there to that one. Walter didn't get back.

Walter always had the yellow pad and always took shorthand. I didn't hear anything.

And I was home at my apartment—this is a typical Johnson story I'm going to tell you

now. I lived in a little 2x4 apartment out there off Shirley Highway called Fairlington.

Anyway, one of those big apartment projects. And my phone rings, and it's the vice

president.

He said, "Rein, I understand you'd like to go out to Hawaii with us." I said, "Well,

yes sir. You know, I'm working up there for Humphrey. One of my jobs is kind of

working with him on his national things since he was a candidate. And, if you have

room, I'd sure like to go along."

He said, "Okay, you come out to Andrews such-and-such a time, and you go with

us." That day! That afternoon. In those days I was always packed. You have to be!

And did. It was an enjoyable trip. George Reedy and I sat together. There was a

military attache-type who was along, too, that I roomed with. A guy named Bud

Vandervort. He used to be liaison here, I think.

When we were on the way out, we were just sitting there, George and I, just

shooting the bull, and Johnson comes forward. He was back in the back. We were in Air

Force something or other. I guess Two. George had given me the draft of the speech to

read that Johnson was going to make. I was on the window-side. George

143

was on the aisle. Johnson sat on the arm of the chair across, and he said, "George, you

got that speech I can look at?" So George just reached over and handed it to him. He

said, "George, don't take things out of people's hand like that!" I thought, Jeez.

They didn't talk about it much, but if you were on his payroll, I understand, you

really had to take a lot of crap. But he was never that way with me, because I didn't work

for them. And he wasn't that way with me in any of that stuff I told you about at the

national committee. We just got shunted aside. Both one of his longest time friends, Jim

Rowe, and myself, just a little functionary working under Rowe's direction.

On that trip—God, it was kind of interesting. We were going to stop in Los

Angeles to dedicate the new airport on the way out to Hawaii. Now, he said, "Rein, when

we get out there, I've got this podium that goes up and down." And he said, "We have

these people on these programs, and a lot of them are short. If you don't mind, how about

being responsible for making that podium go up and down so it will always be right for

the speaker." He said, "I think you know them all."

So, sure enough, I had a list of who was going to be on the program. Well, they left

off the name of the guy who was going to introduce Johnson. And he was a fellow

named Anderson. He was lieutenant governor of California. Pat Brown, I think, was

governor. The reason Pat Brown wasn't there was that Pat Brown had already gone to the

governors' conference.

144

They'd left Anderson's name off the damned list! So the next name on the list is

Johnson. So I ran the podium all the way up to its full height for Johnson to use. This

little guy [laughs] Anderson, I swear to God, the guy wasn't five feet tall. And he had to

stand over on the side. It was too late, then to lower it back down, the way things were

going.

You become aware of the sensitivity of these things when you're a damned advance

man. That's your job, to make sure everything works like clock work. And I took great

pride in usually being able to do that. My two embarrassments were that Amarillo thing

with the airplanes—my only known embarrassments—were that where I was involved

and this thing in California.

But, anyway, the airport was dedicated, and we went on to Hawaii. A fine time was

had by all. And the governors' conference was very enjoyable. I remember one of Pat

Brown's old guys being on board with us. I understand he lobbies for the Saudis now

downtown. Freddy—-can't recall his name. But, anyway, at least he rode back from

Hawaii with us. I don't recall if he rode out, but he'd been a big Kennedy man during the

campaign. So Johnson was very kind about that type of thing. Other times, if I wanted to

go to Texas; or I was in Texas and wanted to come back, I had the phone numbers over

there. And this was after I was off the Hill. I'd call [Bill] Moyers or whoever was

handling things and ask to hook a ride, and they'd give me one. I'd meet them over in

Austin and catch a ride. And that happened a few times.

145

While I had a cordial relationship, I told you about the time I went down to the

White House for a Christmas reception. That had to be right after Kennedy was killed. I

think it was part of inviting the Senate down there. And I remember Johnson passing me

to Lady Bird and saying, "Bird, you probably remember Rein. He's Jim Rowe's friend."

[laughs] Which was his association over that thing. But, he was always nice to me, and I

kind of admit, I liked the guy. He used to, before he went down to the White House,

those stories you hear about what might be called his less than—what would you call

them? country-boy traits—less than refined gentleman.

I remember being in P-38 with him. He would be talking about something. He'd

go over and take a leak in a lavatory he had over there in the corner of the room. He'd

just be talking, taking a big old leak, talking to you at the same time! He was a busy guy,

you know. [laughs]

But I liked him! I didn't have any beef about him. I was always fascinated, though,

by Morrow's feelings as a result of that '52 thing. And I never could discern what the

bitterness was about there. But the way I figure it is Morrow, and George Brown, and

Jessie Jones did put up the green and then they felt this guy owed more loyalty than

perhaps he displayed or that he betrayed them. Or whatever. You know, you really don't

know about those things, and I was too young and green to figure that stuff out then.

RITCHIE: How did Johnson treat Humphrey?

146

VANDER ZEE: Well. I always thought well. I called Humphrey, we talked on

the phone within a matter of minutes after the president was shot. He wasn't in the whip

office. I was in the whip office. So he may have been out of town or over here in the

other office. But, I remember saying, "Senator, if you want to go ahead and pursue this

national office thing," I said, "Johnson's going to be the president. He's going to have to

have a vice president. And that can be you." And, of course, in the final analysis, despite

the games that Johnson played, it couldn't be anybody else. He needed to consolidate the

whole damn thing. I don't know how much of a role Jim Rowe played there. Well, Jim

acted as liaison in the 60's. He was Kennedy to Johnson liaison, number one, beginning

immediately after the nominations.

I think he had a similar role in the Johnson-Humphrey time. I just don't remember.

But I remember telling Humphrey that. Of course, he knew it, too, that he would pretty

well have to be the choice. And he was. He didn't do much overtly. It just kind of had to

come him, as I recall.

Johnson talked about everybody else. In the time, I forget, what was that about,

nearly a year. Well, no it was only about seven months—from the time of the

assassination until the convention. My estimate would be he came to have a greater

respect and admiration and friendship for Humphrey than he started with. Because, you

know how Humphrey hit the Senate. And Johnson was minority leader, I suppose, at that

time. I forget the timing

147

there. No, Humphrey got in '48. And Johnson didn't get minority leader position until

'52. Right?

RITCHIE: Right.

VANDER ZEE: So, I remember him saying things like, "My, God, if I could just

harness that guy's energy." I think he always had great respect—or maybe even envy—of

Humphrey's stumpability and a kind of a supercharged nature. I mean, you remember,

hell, he didn't walk. He bounced! He'd walk into a damn room arms akimbo [stands up

and demonstrates] just going at them. Johnson felt, I think, that there was a great

political talent there that was largely being dissipated on irrelevancies in the early part.

And I think later on he came to see otherwise.

I wasn't around and privy to much, because I was down making a living, in the '68

thing to know, where there has been a lot of speculation about the degree of Johnson

support. Whether or not he could have done more or whether or not he could have done

more the last few days of the campaign, and whether or not he was tacitly really hoping

that Nixon would be the guy because he'd be more apt to carry out Johnson's war policy.

You've heard that speculation.

So, I don't know. I do know that after Baker went to Johnson's ranch and came

back to my house, he had told Johnson that he was staying over at my place. And

Johnson said, "Well, tell old Rein to come see me," you know, like he'd be expected to

do. I

148

never did go see him. I didn't have that much—I wasn't that close to the man.

RITCHIE: I wondered if when Humphrey became vice president, Johnson didn't

look on him as sort of an extended member of his staff rather than as a colleague.

VANDER ZEE: Well, see, I was gone then from the staff, and I don't really know.

I used to drop over to the old State Building there where Humphrey's offices were and

just see the gang. Maybe talk to a few of them about something, pushing my deals. But,

I really wasn't politicking much in those days, and I don't know. I don't know. And

Baker never—to my knowledge—his talks with Johnson on that last visit didn't extend to

anything like that.

I feel that Humphrey had a healthy respect and liking for Johnson. And I think

maybe, in the final analysis, Johnson would have felt they made a good team, that they

covered the gamut of the party's interest. I think he would have termed Humphrey a

loyalist, and I think Humphrey was a loyalist. And I think Humphrey had compromised a

lot of his old positions which cost him support on the left wing of the Democratic party. I

don't know if it was enough to cost him that election, but some people might argue that.

I remember talking to Humphrey again on the phone after the election and just

saying that I was sorry that he didn't make it. But how many men ever had the chance,

ever got the opportunity to

149

make the run? I think that's the way he felt about it. He didn't seem down. We had, to

the extent you can have a friendship with a guy that really doesn't even know his family,

we had a real good friendship for a few years there. But you know, at that stage in his

political life, everybody is busy as hell! If there was only some way when that is going

on that you could stop and savor the moment. But you never can. It's always too

fleeting. Things are happening too fast. Nobody slows down. You're at the height of

your physical energy and usually your intellectual energy during those years. It's just a

damn blur.

That's why something like this, this exercise right here today, can evoke memories

that, hell, you'd have to sit around for days to think up on your own. But by doing this,

you prompt these things to come back.

RITCHIE: Well, you were here during very dramatic times, and you certainly

knew some very dramatic people in that period.

VANDER ZEE: I have nothing but good memories about it. They say that finally

all you take to your grave are your memories. You certainly don't take your physical

possessions. But, hopefully, memories of your family and loved ones go with you. So

that's all you've got. And that period of my life was very personally enriching because I

was just a little old kid from Texas that never would have presumed to even have these

acquaintances or associations.

150

If I learned anything from it, it was that no matter the station in life that people

arrive at, people are all still pretty much the same. And I would have also to say that the

people who were more identified as statesman—what's the definition? A politician is

somebody who worries about the next election; and a statesman is a person who worries

about the next generation. The statesmen—the Rayburns. The Trumans. I also had the

privilege to meet President Truman. I was an invitee to his last birthday party held here

in Washington at the Mayflower. About thirty or forty of us were down there that night,

and I was introduced to him as a new kid working for Democrats. That man had a great

gift. He'd make you feel like he'd known you your whole damned life in a brief meeting

like that.

But all I would say is that the great ones are really the kind of humble types that are

very easy to approach when you know them. And the stuffed shirts, the real stuffed

shirts, they don't make it. They don't make it. I think Johnson in his heart of hearts was a

man of the people. Of course, he was very conscious of self, and he wanted a place in the

history books, and all of that. But I think ultimately he was motivated by what he

thought was in the true best interest of the people at large, and maybe the more modest

among our people.

Certainly Humphrey was. I can only say that I am glad I had the experience. There

were bad moments along with the good, but on balance, they were all favorable

experiences in my lifetime. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of hours with people

who knew

151

these men, especially Johnson, much better than I. And I think in the final analysis, that

he deserved to be president. And he gave it his best shot. And that's where the historians

will have to decide what kind of job was truly done.

Who could predict the direction that world events take? Certainly, there is no such

person. So everything men do ultimately gets interpreted in light of what happens

afterward. I'm sure there are already people who say that all this stuff that was attempted

in the Great Society—or much of it—was a failure. Some might say that the whole civil

rights thing has set the stage for a huge social problem that has to be dealt with some day.

The blacks don't seem to be delivered up from poverty. Some people would say things

are worse rather than better. All I can say is these men were attempting to do the very

best they knew how at the time, and they couldn't do more than that.

RITCHIE: Well, I want to thank you for sharing your perceptions and stories and

personal experiences. They're a very valuable addition to our collection.

VANDER ZEE: Um-hmm. My pleasure, Don. I only regret that I wasn't more

deeply involved and could give insights that could be original or more substantive than

those I've given.

RITCHIE: I think it's going to be a very solid contribution to the collection. I

appreciate it.

152

VANDER ZEE: Okay. Thank you, sir.

RITCHIE: Thank you.

End of Interview #2

153

Index

Administrative Assistant .......................20, 24, 27, 28, 34, 62, 97, 116, 122, 132, 135, 139

Agnew, Spiro ..................................................................................................................119

Anderson, Jack ..................................................................................................................97

Appropriations Committee...........................................................................................11, 75

Armed Services Committee .............................................................................................75

Baker, Bobby ..........................................................................51-52, 57, 59, 62-64, 68-69,

72, 76-79, 82-83, 85-88, 101, 107-111, 147-148

Barrie, Bob ..................................................................................................................19, 33

Barron, Wally ..............................................................................................................37, 38

Bell, Jack .........................................................................................................................125

Blakely, William (D-TX) ...........................................................................................57, 65

Blundell, Jim .............................................................................................................. 57-58

Boeing ................................................................................................................ 60-61, 107

Bottum, Joseph (R-SD) ..................................................................................................114

Brown, Charlie ................................................................................... 41, 46, 131, 143-145

Brown, George .................................................................................................................50

Brownrigg, Billy ..............................................................................................................70

Burdick, Quentin (D-ND) ......................................................................................113, 116

Burney, Cecil .................................................................................................................139

Bush, George ....................................................................................................................32

Byrd, Robert (D-WV) . ............................................................. 86, 113, 117-118, 120-122

154

Carroll Arms ........................................................................................21, 60, 96, 100, 105

Carter, Steven V. ............................................................................................. 17-18, 20-21

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ...................................................................... 26-27, 48

Chavez, Dennis (D-NM) ....................................................................................23, 75, 100

Christie, Syd .....................................................................................................................35

Civil rights legislation .......................................................................... 56, 90-91, 128, 151

Clark, Joseph (D-PA) .................................................................................................... 130

Clinton, Bill ......................................................................................................................89

Cloakrooms, Senate ...................................................... 82, 84, 86, 95, 113, 120, 123, 126

Connally, John ........................................................................................................... 71-72

Connell, Bill .....................................................................................................................34

Conway, John ....................................................................................................................12

Corcoran, Thomas ......................................................................................................30, 58

Darling, Dickie ...........................................................................................................68, 86

Davis, Carl ...................................................................................................................... 77

Dean, Paul .......................................................................................................................103

Democrats ............................................................ 18, 19, 30, 32, 37 40, 49, 66, 81-82, 89,

90, 97, 98, 100, 109-110, 112-113, 120, 131,138, 148, 150

Democratic Senate Campaign Committee ......................................................................109

Dirksen, Everett M. (R-IL) .........................................................................................70, 76

Dodd, Thomas (D-CT) ................................................................................................. 96-97

Douglas, Paul (D-IL) ...................................................................................................4, 71

Duke, Joe ..................................................................................................53, 54, 61, 70, 73

155

Eastland, James (D-MS) ...................................................................................................90

Eisenhower, Dwight .........................................................................................................82

Ellender, Allen (D-LA) ..............................................................................................61, 75

Ellmore, Clarence ............................................................................................................38

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ........................................... 5, 6, 8-13, 17, 27, 48-50

Ferris, Charles .............................................................................................................69, 82

Finance Committee ....................................................................................................75, 78

Flannigan, Frip .................................................................................................................12

Fulbright, J. William (D-AR) ..............................................................................92, 95, 122

General Accounting Office (GAO) ..................................................................................11

Georgetown Law School ............................................................................................16, 59

Goldwater, Barry (R-AZ) ...........................................................................................39, 40

Hardeman, D.B. ...............................................................................................................28

Hayden, Carl (D-AZ) .......................................................................................................61

Heslop, Tom ...........................................................................................................100, 105

Hoover, J. Edgar .......................................................................................... 8-9, 11, 13, 50

Humphrey, Hubert (D-MN) ................................................4, 10, 19, 33-34, 36-37, 39-42,

45-48, 53, 67-68, 71-74, 76, 80, 81, 94, 96, 106-107,

117-118, 129, 134, 137, 141-142, 145-148, 150

Javits, Jacob (R-NY) ......................................................................................................117

Jenkins, Walter ....................................................................................... 51, 55-56, 141-142

Johnson, Grace ..................................................................................................................61

Johnson, Lyndon (D-TX) ........................ 1, 20, 45-47, 49-58, 63-66, 71-75, 82-83, 85-88,

156

91-93, 97, 99, 109-110, 125, 128, 138, 139-148, 150-151

Jones, Jessie .....................................................................................................................50

Jordan, B. Everett (D-NC) ...............................................................................................62

Kennedy, Edward (D-MA) .......................................................................................43, 125

Kennedy, John (D-MA) .............................................20, 35, 37, 38, 43, 46, 47, 53, 54, 56,

57, 63-65, 71, 73, 91-94, 97, 115, 121, 124-126, 128-131, 141, 144-146

Kennedy, Robert (D-NY) ..................................................................................................38

Kerr, Robert (D-OK) ................................................................................. 69, 75-77, 86, 93

Kilday, Paul ......................................................................................................................30

King, Larry Leo ...............................................................................................................79

Kyl, John ...........................................................................................................................19

Lawrence, Bill ............................................................................................................35, 45

Lloyd, Bill ..................................................................................................................64, 66

Lobbyists ..................................................................................................95, 101, 106, 133

Long, Oren ................................................................................................................. 55-56

Majority leader, Senate .............................................................................. 81-82, 84-85, 93

Manatos, Mike ...............................................................................................................130

Mansfield, Mike (D-MT) ....................................... 59, 69, 72-76, 83, 85, 94, 99, 109, 125

Maybank, Burnet (D-SC) .................................................................................................88

Maverick, Maury ........................................................................................................ 29-31

McCarthy, Eugene (D-MN) ...................................................................................113, 140

McClendon, Sarah ............................................................................................................61

McGrath, J. Howard .........................................................................................................50

157

McGuire, Dick .................................................................................................................54

McPherson, Harry ................................................................................................. 69, 87-88

Medicare ..........................................................................................................................76

Miller, Harold ........................................................................................................122, 132

Minority leader, Senate .................................................................................... 82, 146-147

Mohlenhoff, Clark ............................................................................................................22

Morrow, Wright .................................................................................................. 49-52, 145

Moyers, Bill ...................................................................................................................144

Muskie, Edmund (D-ME) .........................................................................................68, 113

NASA ...............................................................................................................................77

Navy .......................................................................................................... 13-14, 16, 48, 71

Neeley, Matthew (D-WV) ..............................................................................118, 122, 132

Nelson, Gaylord (D-WI) ........................................................................................113, 116

New York Times ...............................................................................................................35

Nixon, Richard .................................................................................................53, 119, 147

Novak, Robert ...................................................................................................................60

O'Brien, Larry ............................................................................................................. 37-38

O'Donnell, Kenny ....................................................................................................37, 129

O'Mahoney, Joseph (D-WY) .........................................................................................130

One Sixteen (116) Club .................................................................................................104

Otten, Alan ........................................................................................................... 35-36, 45

Peek, Scott ..............................................................................................................104, 112

Political Action Committees (PACs) ...............................................................................78

158

Powers, Francis Gary .......................................................................................................47

Press ...................................................................................... 22-24, 34, 37, 47, 88, 98, 102

Proxmire, William (D-WI) .......................................................................................... 71-72

Purcell, Graham ..............................................................................................................141

Quorum Club ................................................................ ...................................99, 101-105

Randolph, Jennings (D-WV) ..................... ........................................................76, 93, 118

Rayburn, Sam ........................................ ..................................................................... 27-28

Reber, Joe ............................................. ............................................................................60

Reedy, George ........................................................................................................127, 142

Republicans .................... ............................................................ 18-19, 32, 33, 40, 76, 131

Ribicoff, Abraham (D-CT) .............................. ..............................................................117

Robbie, Joe ............................................ ...........................................................................73

Roosevelt, Franklin .................... ..............................................................23, 30, 56, 58, 63

Rowe, James H., Jr. ............. .............. 30, 31, 42, 46, 53-56, 58, 74, 90, 140, 143, 145-146

Rusk, Dean ............................................ .........................................................................129

Russell, Mark ..................................... ......................................................................21, 100

Russell, Richard (D-GA) .............. .......................................................75, 87, 90, 113, 115

Shiff, Edna ....................................... ...................................................................... 138-139

Smathers, George (D-FL) ........................... ........................................................... 111-112

Smith, Benjamin (D-MA) ................................ ..............................................................115

Smith, C.R. ............................................ ...........................................................................54

Springer, Jim ..................................... ........................................................................ .26-27

Stennis, John (D-MS) .................................................................................................83, 90

159

Stevenson, Adlai ................................. ...................................................................125, 140

Stewart, Walter (Joe) ....... ...................................................... 4, 53-54, 68, 73, 82, 86, 109

Symington, Stuart (D-MO) ................. ...................................................... 20, 41-43, 45-47

Teasdale, Ken .......................................... .........................................................................69

Television .................................... .......................................................................90, 98, 124

Tolson, Clyde ........................................... ..........................................................................9

Tower, John (R-TX) .........................................................................................................58

Trent, Kurt ........................................................................................................................38

Trice, J. Mark ......................................... ..........................................................................70

Truman, Harry S. ............................... ................................................................ 41-42, 150

U-2 Incident ........................................ ....................................................................... 47-48

Udall, Morris ........................................... ...........................................................................4

Udall, Stewart .......................................... ..........................................................................4

Vietnam War ....................................... .....................................................................97, 131

Wall Street Journal ................................ ....................................................................36, 60

West Virginia Primary ............ ....... 34-37, 41, 44-47, 49, 67, 117-119, 121-122, 129, 137

Wheeling and Dealing ......................................................................................................79

Whip, Senate Majority ........ ...........................67-68, 71-74, 81-82, 94, 120, 122, 129, 146

Williams, Lee ......................................... ........................................................................104

Young, Steven (D-OH) ............................... ............................................................ 116-117

DEED OF GIFT I, Rein J. Vander Zee, do hereby give to the Senate Historical Office the tape recordings and transcripts of my interviews on January 28, 1992. I authorize the Senate Historical Office to use the tapes and transcripts in such a manner as may best serve the educational and historical objectives of their oral history program. I also approve the deposit of the transcripts at the Library of Congress, National Archives, Senate Library, and any other institution which the Senate Historical Office may deem appropriate. In making this gift, I voluntarily convey ownership of the tapes and transcripts to the public domain. Rein J. Vander Zee Accepted on behalf of the Senate Historical Office by: Richard A. Baker

i

Preface

Behind swinging doors in the rear of the Senate chamber, on either side of the

central door, are el-shaped cloakrooms for Democratic and Republican senators. Close to

the floor, but away from public view, senators can meet informally in the cloakroom to

work out legislative compromises, use the phones, or simply rest on the leather couches.

The cloakrooms have become synonymous with backstage political dealing, as majority

leader Lyndon Johnson once advised Senator Hubert Humphrey:

Now you don't just come right out on the floor and lay important bills right out in

front of God and all those voters. That's not the way it's done, and you could lose

before you get started, which doesn't look good to the folks back home. You have

to take it slow and easy, working your colleagues over like gentlemen--not on the

floor but in the cloakrooms--explaining and trading, but always letting them see

what's in it for them. Then when you're sure--Ivory soap sure, and you know you

have the votes buttoned up in your back pocket--you come out statesmanlike on

the Senate floor and, in the spirit of democracy, have a little debate for the people.

Rein Vander Zee served both as assistant to Senator Humphrey when he became

Democratic whip and later as assistant secretary of the majority, where he supervised the

Democratic cloakroom and

ii

assisted majority leader Mike Mansfield and Democratic secretary Bobby Baker. Having

previously worked on the staff of Iowa Representative Steven V. Carter, Vander Zee had

joined Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign during the 1960 primaries, most notably

in the decisive West Virginia primary between Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. He then

acted as an advance man for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, before joining the Senate staff

in 1961. His oral history recounts the personalities and politics of the era, among the

senators, the staff, and presidential administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon

Johnson.

Born in Texas in 1928, and raised in the Hill Country, Rein Vander Zee attended

public schools and the Texas Military Institute, Schreiner Institute, and the University of

Arizona. After college he worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and served in

naval intelligence. He later received a law degree from Georgetown Law School. After

leaving the Senate staff in 1964, he remained in Washington as a lawyer and lobbyist,

and worked for Johnson and Humprhey during the 1968 campaign, before returning to

Texas in 1970.

About the Interviewer: Donald A. Ritchie is associate historian of the Senate Historical

Office. A graduate of C.C.N.Y., he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of

Maryland. He has published articles on American political history and oral history,

including "Oral History in the Federal Government," which appeared in the Journal of

American History. His books include James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Harvard

iii

Press, 1980), The U.S. Constitution (Chelsea House, 1989), History of a Free Nation

(Glencoe, 1991), and Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents

(Harvard, 1991). He also edits the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee (Historical Series) (Government Printing Office). A former president of both

the Oral History Association and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he

received OHMAR's Forrest C. Pogue Award for distinguished contributions to the field

of oral history.

Transcribed by Elizabeth J. Strannigan